Young Hawker Gives Up 6-Year-Old Prawn Noodle Stall Due To Rising Operational Costs & Lack Of Manpower

Covid-19 has disrupted our local hawker scene, with a few young hawkers calling it a day after struggling to stay afloat during the pandemic. Another stall to announce its closure is Ming’s Prawn Noodle, which has been serving excellent prawn mee at Alexandra Village Food Centre for the past six years.

It was opened by At-Sunrice GlobalChef Academy graduate Cai Jiaming, 31, who had interned at defunct Spanish restaurant Catalunya. After learning how to make crustacean stock during his training stint, he was inspired to start his own prawn noodle hawker stall using the same fine cooking technique to make prawn soup. His efforts earned him an invitation to the Prime Minister’s Chinese New Year Garden Party in 2017, where he showcased his dish alongside six other young hawkers.

Closing his stall next week

But come January 31, Jiaming will shutter his stall for good as he has decided not to renew its lease, which is ending in March. He tells 8days.sg that there were several reasons behind the closure, including a drop in business and rising operational costs. “The market has been quite volatile and the [hawker centre’s footfall] is definitely not like in the past. My income has been affected due to the pandemic, and it’s difficult to gauge the demand,” he explains. “My stall is ultimately my baby. I thought the light at the end of the tunnel was coming, but everything seems to be uncertain for now.”

Despite the current five-pax dine-in rule, Jiaming does not foresee his business being sustainable in the long run. “[Dining in] can go back to two pax anytime if there’s another outbreak, to be honest,” he points out. He also shares that it has been challenging to run his stall when “the cost of goods are increasing for seafood and all. Even prices for oil rose.”

While he acknowledges that things might get “better” in the future, he reckons that “knowing suppliers, the prices won’t go down for a while”. This presented a headache for Jiaming, who was forced to “increase my price by 50 cents half a year ago” to cover his costs. “Not all received it well,” he laughs. “If I have to [keep resorting] to increasing my prices, customers may not be understanding enough to accept it. Some still think I want to earn more off them.”



Manpower woes

Jiaming also cites a lack of manpower as “one of my biggest challenges”, having hired a few stall assistants who didn’t stay “more than a month”. He says: “I was paying them $1800 to $2000 and they found their pay too little, working six days a week from 7am to 3pm. That’s the life of a hawker.”

In his six years of running a hawker stall, Jiaming had only taken MC once. “This year was the first time, ‘cos of tonsillitis,” he says. “Each day that I don’t operate means there’s no income.”



Planning to sell prawn mee online

Next, Jiaming is “working out a model to take in limited orders through mingsprawnnoodle.com”. He also doesn’t rule out opening a standalone prawn mee shop “if there’s a good opportunity and location”. He muses, “I’ll probably wait till things get better, then I may go back to hawkering or maybe get a shopfront. But probably shopfront if possible, so [hiring] manpower would be easier.”

Ming’s Prawn Noodle is open till Jan 31, 2022, #01-01 Alexandra Village Food Centre, 120 Bukit Merah Ln 1, S150120. Tel: 9616-0495. Open daily except Wed, 7am-3pm. www.facebook.com/pg/mingsprawnnoodle