When Diana Cheng first started her restaurant, she had no money to spend on printing proper menus. So, she and a friend wrote the names of dishes and prices on sheets of paper. They laminated and used these as menu cards.
The then 26-year-old didn’t want to burn her savings on décor for the restaurant. She decided to create a “retro, homely feel” by using things from her own home. So, out came her own “tingkat” or tiffin carrier collection and old bicycle. As for wall pictures, she helped herself to old shots from her parent’s album. She bought kopi-tiam style furniture and crockery from Malaysia.
The bubbly Diana wanted to be true to herself and to her mother, whose recipes she was “stealing”. She called her maiden venture at Holland Village, My Mum’s Cuisine.
“I wanted the restaurant to be known for service with a smile and for its good Asian food. It meant working very hard and very long hours. It was tough because I had to do everything myself. My mother, who was running a hawker stall with my father, came over to help me with the cooking. She did most of the cooking, but I too had to cook. I was also taking orders, listening to customer complaints, keeping accounts and juggling budgets.”
But the business boomed because Diana had a good feel of what the market wanted. Coming from a three-room flat in Ghim Moh, she was familiar with the needs of the mainly expatriate community that frequented Holland Village.
Success whetted her appetite to expand the business. Her family moved to a five-room flat and she bought the Noodle Hut registered name of her parent’s hawker stall, turning it into a chain of restaurants serving Northern Chinese food. The Chengs are Hainanese but have adopted a Peranakan touch for My Mum’s Cuisine.
In hot soup
Diana and friends also opened a few more restaurants in the Stamford Road area. The Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s badly affected Diana’s business. While her friends could shrug it off, Diana decided that she was in the restaurant business for the long haul. She needed to face her creditors and redeem her reputation. She was prepared to sell off whatever was necessary to pay off her debts.
In all her upswings and downswings, Diana’s parents have remained supportive. Just as they were there to see her try out her business, they were there to help her when things failed, even selling their flat.
Their generous gesture saved Diana her Noodle Hut business and My Mum’s Cuisine restaurant which she had moved to Paragon by then. She also decided to take their advice and give herself a break. She left for Cornell University in the U.S to study for a Masters degree in Hospitality Management. The former St Nicholas and Singapore Polytechnic student already had a basic degree from RMIT (Australia).
Business by email
During her years at Cornell, she continued running her business. “I managed because I could take advantage of the time difference between the U.S and Singapore. I also had some very good managers to help me run the place and keep me updated via email.”
In the final month of her course, her landlords at the Paragon had financial difficulties and her staff were uncertain about their future. Diana convinced Cornell to let her take her exams early in order to fly home to steer her business back on track.
It is this single-minded pursuit that has kept her business healthy, even though she confesses, it drains her, leaving little time for socialising. Happy to remain single (for now), she’s just allowed herself a small luxury to de-stress – a huge couch which she just plonks herself on to watch TV, and unwind.
She complains that it’s sometimes hard for her to explain to her staff what she means by service with a big smile. When they don’t understand her exacting standards, she sometimes loses her temper and shouts.
Drop quote
“I need good people who understand my vision for the business. Singaporean workers can be demanding, but they are good because they are comfortable talking to tourists and chatting with customers. If people don’t perform, I have no choice but to fire them because service is important to me. When I make such demands on my staff, I also have a responsibility to them. I have to have a career path in mind for them at My Mum’s Cuisine. They have to find it worth their while to work for me. As a result, I have to expand the business and make it grow. Nobody wants to give their best to a stagnant business.”
Diana’s expansion programme includes a manufacturing arm making ready-to-use Asian sauces under the My Mum’s Cuisine brand. Together with the restaurants, she plans to take the business to the next frontier and finally, put it on the global map.
Next stop: Setting up My Mum’s Cuisine with partners in other Asian cities, starting with Jakarta.
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Diana and her Mum
Everyone who works at My Mum's Cuisine calls Diana's mother, Mrs Cheng Tong Jee Gun, “Mother”. The sprightly lady's creative cooking skills is what the business has been built on. Mrs Cheng's favourite photograph of herself as a 19-year-old is also the icon for My Mum's Cuisine.
She has relinquished her stove duties, preferring instead the role of Mother and Mentor to the business run by her equally-energetic daughter. Mother turned down a request to be photographed because she was not looking her best at the time of the interview.
“My mother is quite vain. She will go to the hairdresser and ask for her hair to be cut in the same style as in the photograph,” says Diana.
Though she is now truly a successful businesswoman who has bought her parents a semi-detached house and herself an Oxford Road apartment, Diana remains a simple girl at heart.
“I feel a huge responsibility towards my parents because they gave up so much to let me gamble with my idea of running a business,” she adds.
“As a child who went to an SAP school, I had friends who were rich. They had expensive dolls and toys to play with. When I asked my mother for these, she always said I couldn't have them. At that time, I did not understand that mother could not afford such extravagances,” said Diana.
Perhaps, such memories strengthened her resolve to work hard for what she wanted.
While her parents were busy, Diana looked after her brother and helped out at her parents' hawker stall.
“That was where I got my first training to run a food business.” While kids her age were enjoying hobbies, Diana learnt to cook and could already make good chendol. And it's paid off. |
