Be like water, said the late Bruce Lee. In Jeremmy Chiam’s case, this might just work. The former chef-owner of Le Binchotan once parlayed high-end, FrenchJapanese gastronomy into a Hokkien mee takeaway mid-pandemic.
He now heads Iko, a contemporary Japanese izakaya that officially opened on April 22 – just three weeks before dine-in restrictions came into effect. “We’d been through worse during the circuit breaker.”
No stranger to turbulence, the 35-yearold spent four years as a Singapore Airlines steward and travelled the world while working for free at the Michelin-starred Parisian restaurant Sola owned by his mentor Hiroki Yoshitake.
Before that, he was, as he tells us with candour, “a typical lost teen who didn’t know what to do in life”. He’d elected to study engineering, but that wasn’t his thing. Chiam quit school and went through a string of odd jobs before landing a part-time service role at the now-defunct Ponderosa.
This story is from the August 2021 edition of The PEAK Singapore.
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This story is from the August 2021 edition of The PEAK Singapore.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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