At 23, she landed a job at a 3-star Michelin restaurant. Less than 2 years later, she left to run a food stall in Singapore.

14.03.2024 - 00:43 / insider.com

Shanice Lim's first job had her working 16-hour days four times a week.

She was 23 and had just graduated from the Culinary Institute of America's Singapore campus. The job she had landed was at Zen, one of just three of the city-state's three-star Michelin restaurants.

It appeared as though Lim had quickly achieved her childhood dream. She had long wanted to be a chef, just like her grandmother, who had taught her to cook classic Singaporean dishes while growing up.

Lim's grandmother once ran a stall in a hawker center — an open-air food court, popular for dining in Singapore — where she served hundreds of hungry locals for just a few dollars a plate.

At Zen, Lim traded her favorite comfort food for Japanese-inspired European haute cuisine. There, she was part of a brigade of chefs who strived for perfection. The restaurant's fixed dinner menu starts at 580 Singapore dollars, or $435.

"I learned that discipline is the most important thing in fine dining, there's a lot of focus involved, and we can't mess things up. There's a lot of pressure," Lim told Business Insider.

Despite her early success, Lim realized that it wasn't for her. Less than two years after starting, she quit. She decided to follow in her grandmother's footsteps and run her own hawker stall.

"I wanted to do something that's not fine dining," Lim said.

"I challenged myself to learn as much as I can in the one and a half years I worked at Zen. It was like training for me, we didn't do the same thing every day," she continued.

In May 2023, Lim opened up a stall serving nasi lemak — a Malay coconut rice dish served with side dishes like fried chicken, dried anchovies, otah, or spiced fish cake, and sambal, a sweet, spicy chili sauce. The small hawker center is located in a bustling neighborhood in eastern Singapore, surrounded by blocks of public housing and wet markets. It was a world away from the glitzy, towering skyscrapers and million-dollar shophouses that surrounded Zen downtown.

Lim named her stall "So Lemak," a flavor descriptor unique to Malay cuisine. According to local food historian Khir Johari, lemak is used to describe the richness and creaminess of coconut milk — a key ingredient in nasi lemak.

Hawker centers are the heart of Singapore's local food culture. There are 118 markets and hawker centers across the country, where thousands of vendors compete for the millions of people looking to eat cheap, delicious food.

In the world's most expensive city, hawker stalls are one of the cheapest food businesses to start up. Local food critic and serial hawker entrepreneur KF Seetoh told BI that vendors only need to spend between SG$15,000 and SG$20,000, on average, to get their stall up and running. This includes kitchen