FROM LEGACY TO UNCERTAINTY

These heritage restaurants have lasted for generations, but will rising rent eventually bring them down?

- Cherie Lok

Chew Kee Eating House boasts a claim few restaurants can these days. It has sold the same dish at the same unit in Upper Cross Street for 76 years, passing from one generation to the next in an unbroken line of succession.

The vagaries of modern business, however, mean that the future of the purported birthplace of soya sauce chicken in Singapore now hangs by a thread. Its lease expires later in 2025, and third-generation owner Thomas Ho is not ruling out the possibility of calling time on the family business.

"We're not sure about the future, we'll need to see what our landlord does. If rent increases and the cost of ingredients continues to go up, there's only so much we can increase the price of food to keep up," says the 40-year-old, whose rent has gone up by 18 per cent in recent years.

Heritage trades like his are on edge amid rising rentals, the more drastic of which have booted out businesses like Flor Patisserie in Siglap Drive, whose landlord wanted to raise rent by 57 per cent.

Amid the maelstrom of uncertainty, The Sunday Times speaks to four multi-generational restaurants to find out how they are coping, and what will be lost if they succumb.

TRADITIONAL TRADES, MODERN PROBLEMS

Pricey ingredients and pricier rents weigh down most food and beverage businesses in Singapore. But keeping up with the pressures of the present is arguably more onerous for heritage restaurants, which are also obligated to keep one eye on the past.

Mr Ho, for one, is held back by tradition when it comes to revising prices. A standard plate of Chew Kee chicken noodles used to cost $4.50 in the early 2000s; it is $6 today.

"Our regulars remember how much it used to cost and we don't want this food to become a burden to them," he says, adding that he last raised prices by around 50 cents a serving four years ago.