The bearded, bespectacled, Bermuda-shorted bro behind edgy Middle Eastern restaurant Artichoke is the real deal: he teaches at the CIA, his restaurant is as buzzing as ever, he’s expanded to making exotic popsicles with Neh Neh Pop and his delicious Thai food pop-up Bird Bird is getting a permanent home on Ann Siang Hill. But his biggest superpower might in fact be being one of the best managers in Singapore’s F&B scene.

When I was four, my mom asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I told her I wanted to be a snowman. The next year, I told her I wanted to be a rice cooker. I didn’t mean the machine, I meant the person cooking rice. 

I spent my afternoons as a kid reading cookbooks. I was able to read a recipe and visualize how the dish started and finished. It was like learning kungfu from reading a book.

I was whipping up my own nasty creations from the time I was 12: all manners of instant noodles, all versions of eggs, canned sausages and barbecued beans from a can. 

I was living in Australia, having a very comfortable life. I almost did a PhD in food marketing. But then I got the itch to start my own restaurant. 

I knew if I opened a restaurant there, I wouldn’t be able to fly back to visit my family and aging grandparents. So I opened a restaurant in Singapore.

There are so many restaurants here, and they’re all either French, Japanese, Italian or burger bars. So I thought if I were going to risk everything, give up my PR status, my car, my home, I better come back and do something totally different. 

There were people doing Middle Eastern in Singapore, but they were very ethnic, traditional, grandma-style. No one was sexing it up.

A lot of Singaporeans don’t want to do dishes, therefore you have to hire from abroad. But it’s not like the people from abroad want to do it either. 

When I lived in Australia, I worked the midnight shift at 7-11, the most dangerous shift to work in a convenience store in Australia, where the crime rate is extremely high. But the Aussies didn’t want to do it. But I, the young Asian international student, wanted to not because I loved the job but because the money was good enough to warrant the risk. Come on, part-time job pays you $38 an hour? 

A lot of restaurateurs complain about staffing issues. It comes down to management structure. We don’t just pay our staff a salary to be a pair of hands and legs.

We go on a company trip every year. We close the restaurant for over a week. I pay for airfare, accommodation, spending money, and we go out and eat at all these top restaurants and become the most lavish of consumers for one week. We just came back from Japan. Next year we’re going to London and Istanbul. 

Everyone who works for me has a career path. The path starts from the time they arrive to the time they become head chefs of their own outlets. I look far for them, and people know that and word gets around.

I’m a good manager because everything that my guys do now I’ve done before. There are a lot of people who have money, who open businesses and think, “If I’ve got money, I can hire someone to do the job. I can hire someone to pick up this piece of snotty paper on the table.”

You can hire someone, but you don’t have their loyalty or respect, unless you show them that you can pick up that snot-filled paper with your own bare hands before you ask them to do it. 

As my company grows, the next business will not start up the same way as Artichoke. I will not be driving around to my relatives’ homes, stealing their chairs and begging for money from different people. 

But my objective in any business moving forward is to make sure that, no matter how well-funded it is, it needs to have the same soul as Artichoke. It needs to be headed by someone hungry for success, hungry for survival. Their salary, their face, their fame, everything relies on it. 

The heart of Bird Bird is grilled chicken, papaya salad and sticky rice. And we’ll be serving khao soi [northern Thai curried noodles].

You don’t find good versions of khao soi in Singapore—they’re too rich and coconut-y. No one has the balls to do it in a cheap, dirty way.

A lot of food in Thailand is cheap and dirty, but unfortunately in Singapore—or anywhere else they export the cuisine—it becomes too polished, and that dirtiness is lost.

The number one rule of running a restaurant: don’t be an ass. 

Ego is very common in this industry. I’ve worked for people who, at the end of the month, when my paycheck is due, have said things like, “I’ll see how I feel about paying you.” They let the ego get to their head.