S’pore ex-Michelin chef quit fine dining to sell mee pok—now he’s opening a S$400K coffeeshop

With three hawker concepts under its belt, JOFA is looking to operate its own coffee shop next

Most hawkers spend years perfecting a single stall. But for Joel Tan (30), Fabian Lim (30), and Liang Jun Hao (31), one concept was never the end goal.

From one mee pok stall in Tampines, the trio has built a business with multiple concepts, including Western food, Japanese rice bowls, and soon, their own coffee shop. Along the way, they’ve had their fair share of wins and setbacks, from expanding to new outlets to losing over S$70,000 on a poorly chosen location.

Vulcan Post spoke with Joel of JOFA Grill to find out how the trio built a multi-concept F&B business in Singapore’s competitive hawker scene.

Leaving fine dining for the hawker scene

Before becoming a hawker entrepreneur, Joel spent years working in professional kitchens.

He first met Jun Hao while they were both chefs, but it was his friendship with Fabian that eventually led him into the hawker business. Fabian came from a completely different background in construction and had no F&B experience, but had long wanted to start a hawker business. He repeatedly approached Joel about turning the idea into reality.

At the time, Joel was building his career in fine dining, working at Michelin-starred restaurants including Burnt Ends and Joël Robuchon Restaurant. But the idea of building something of his own eventually became too hard to ignore.

With S$30,000 in capital, the pair launched JOFA Meepok in Tampines in Jul 2021. The name itself is a nod to its founders: “Jo” from Joel, “fa” from Fabian.

Unlike many hawker stalls built on inherited recipes, JOFA Meepok’s formula came from pure trial and error. Before opening, Joel and Fabian spent three to four months eating their way through 10 to 11 different meepok shops, noting what they liked from each.

“It’s more of a bowl of meepok that both of us like to eat, based on our own definition,” Joel said.

Rather than anchoring quality to a single cook’s hand, Joel built the business around a strict standard operating procedure (SOP), specifying everything down to noodle thickness and alkaline levels with their supplier, so that any staff member could replicate the result consistently.

Customers kept coming back for three things in particular: the noodles, the housemade chilli, and a soup boiled from pork bones and chicken, amongst other ingredients.

The bet on strict SOPs paid off. JOFA Meepok broke even in just four months.

Outlet closures & financial losses

By Sep 2022, Joel was ready to bring more of his professional kitchen experience into his hawker concepts. JOFA’s second concept, JOFA Grill, opened in Bukit Merah Central, with Jun Hao joining the partnership around this time.

Inspired by his time at grill restaurant Panamericana, Joel introduced charcoal and lychee wood-fired grilling for chicken chops—an unusual approach for a coffee shop setting, where most Western stalls relied on flat-top hot plates. The black pepper sauce was also adapted from a restaurant-grade recipe and reworked to suit hawker prices.

But JOFA Grill’s early days were rockier than JOFA Meepok’s.

It cost S$65,000 to set up, and the Bukit Merah location struggled with an office crowd that was unwilling to pay S$6 to S$7 for Western food daily, as well as stiff competition from a nearby food centre.

Early media attention brought a surge of customers, but the team was still refining its SOPs for cooking proteins, making it difficult to maintain consistency during busy periods. The outlet eventually closed in Mar 2025.

Meanwhile, JOFA Meepok was learning its own hard lessons.

While the brand expanded to a second outlet at Woodlands Mart in Mar 2024, its original outlet went through multiple relocations, often because incoming coffee shop operators wanted to bring in different brands.

One of the most expensive mistakes came after the team ended its lease at Tampines. In a rush to avoid paying for equipment storage while searching for a new location, they moved into a Jalan Besar unit without fully assessing its suitability.

The rent was high, customer traffic was weak, and sales were so poor that keeping the stall open cost more than shutting it down.

When they tried to exit the lease early, the operator threatened legal action. Unable to absorb the legal costs of a dispute, the founders ended up paying rent on an empty, non-operating stall for months, racking up a loss of more than S$70,000.

It would have been more costly to run daily operations than to leave the stall empty with that low footfall. It turned out to be the biggest lesson for us—to not rush into things just to save small money. Joel Tan

The team eventually managed to exit the Jalan Besar location, but after reassessing their operations, they decided to shutter the outlet in Jan 2026. Today, JOFA Meepok operates solely from its Woodlands Mart location.

Maximising resources & growing the business

While the original JOFA Grill outlet eventually closed, the team did not abandon the concept.

Instead, they relaunched JOFA Grill as part of a dual-concept model, pairing it with JOFA Oji-Donburi, a Japanese rice bowl line, at stalls in Tampines and Punggol.

The business model was also a practical solution to Singapore’s rising stall rental costs. By running two concepts under one rental unit, the team could maximise space and resources. The two menus shared the same equipment, ingredients, and manpower, with items like chicken chop appearing across both menus.

The setup proved popular with customers. The first dual-concept outlet in Tampines broke even within six months and has remained profitable since, encouraging the team to open a second location at Punggol’s Northshore Drive.

Over the years, growing to three locations across three concepts and 14 to 16 full-time staff, the founders have stepped back from running everything hands-on.

Two store managers now oversee daily operations, train new hires, and keep standards consistent across outlets. The founders meet with them monthly to review customer feedback and consider recipe tweaks.

The growth also changed how the founders viewed their responsibilities. With staff depending on them for their livelihoods, walking away is no longer a decision they take lightly.

“I still wake up every day (feeling) tired and stressed,” Joel said, “but I would pick this stress and fatigue any time, any day—because the fulfilment I get from this is different.”

Opening a S$400K coffee shop

After years of navigating landlords and coffee shop operators as tenants—some reasonable, some anything but—the JOFA founders are now stepping into a new role: becoming operators themselves.

Come Jul, they are opening a coffee shop at 531 Bedok North Street 3, in a joint venture with three other partners, including former coffee shop operators. The project comes with an estimated set-up cost of around S$400,000, covering renovation, concept planning, and lease deposits.

Rather than buying the property, the group has opted for a lease model, which typically runs six to eight years. A JOFA stall will anchor the coffee shop, alongside other tenants running complementary concepts.

Diners can expect a JOFA stall anchoring the coffee shop, likely complementing JOFA’s concepts with other tenants. “We try to be fair and run things properly,” Joel said, drawing a deliberate contrast with the landlords they’d clashed with as tenants.

The bigger challenge, he acknowledged, isn’t running the coffee shop itself—it’s managing the tenants within it, ensuring each stall pulls enough customers to stay viable. For now, they hope to break even within a year and launch a fish soup concept around the end of 2026, with big ambitions to hit 10 outlets within the next three years.

Despite the outward appearance of a thriving brand, Joel gave honest insight into the local F&B industry. Margins in F&B remain tight, and the bar to stay afloat has risen. He added that hawkers should explore all avenues of revenue, including the digitising of their business onto delivery platforms.

“It’s no longer an extra thing—it’s a way of life now,” he said of food delivery platforms, arguing that stalls without a digital presence are quietly ceding market share to those that do.

For anyone thinking about starting a hawker business, his advice is to treat it as a business first, not a passion project.

“It’s not about just cooking for friends and family anymore,” he said. Recipes built for a home kitchen rarely translate to a commercial, cost-conscious setting in the hawker scene. 

As JOFA heads into its fifth year, the founders show no signs of slowing down, even as their next venture takes them furthest yet from the mee pok stall where it all began.

• Find out more about JOFA Grill here.
• Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.

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Featured Image Credit: JOFA