Jason Chua — better known as Beng Who Cooks — is a chef who just last month, opened a new sando concept restaurant six months after he closed Beng Who Cooks at Neil Road.
He first shot to fame as the youngest-ever hawker to set up a stall in 2018, before his free food service during the ‘Circuit Breaker’ brought him even more attention.
Capitalising on the fame, he upgraded to a restaurant to fuel his growth ambitions. However, a proposed 60% increase in rent forced Mr Chua to close the restaurant in October 2022.
As this coincided with the arrival of his baby, the added responsibilities of being a family man and father weighed heavily on him. He even tried taking his own life.
But since 22 Mar, Mr Chua is back to doing what he does best — working. His new sando concept restaurant, Wild Crumbs, is a joint project with chef Titus Chong, who helms the kitchen.
While he’s not in the kitchen this time, Mr Chua has a loftier goal: changing how the F&B industry works and promising more work-life balance for his staff.
For example, the restaurant is only open from 10am to 4pm, Mondays to Fridays. This frees his weekends up for family time and other pursuits.
It’s not hard to see how the 31-year-old got the moniker, with his loud manner of speech and tattoos covering much of his upper body.
In his youth, Mr Chua was a professional boxer who represented Singapore internationally. The people he hung out with ended up calling him “Beng” since it was a common moniker for a Chinese person in their circles.
Later, when he started cooking, the name just stuck and Mr Chua decided to embrace his “beng-ness”.
But Mr Chua soon found out that boxing wasn’t going to pay the bills.
Since both of his parents had been in the food and beverage (F&B) industry for generations, Mr Chua decided to jump into the industry himself.
“(F&B) is all I know,” he told MS News frankly.
And so, at the age of 24, Mr Chua became the youngest hawker in Singapore when he set up his first hawker stall selling poke bowls in 2018.
This convergence with food and his boxing background, which emphasises discipline and goal-setting, meant he was always “chionging”.
Mr Chua attributed this “tunnel-vision” to his experiences cutting weight so he could compete in a certain weight class.
Within two years, he expanded to a restaurant, Beng Who Cooks, at Neil Road in 2020.
He was ambitious — and he knew it. Work was an addiction and what drove his purpose in life.
Mr Chua recalled working 16-hour days because “sleep is a waste of time” to him — he’s never been much of a sleeper.
“Like I always said, if everybody has 24 hours (in a day), I’ve got 26 hours.”
But he realised just how unsustainable his lifestyle was last year when he started having to shoulder family responsibilities on top of his restaurant.
Mr Chua’s son was born last year. At the same time, he had just bought a new flat.
During the first three months since his baby’s birth, Mr Chua “did not feel (like a father)” because he was always working and away from home.
But his feelings changed when his son started uttering his first words at five months old.
Source: @jasonbigmoney_bwc on Instagram
“That was when I felt I missed a lot of my kid’s growth, and then the stress (of raising a kid) and house stress came up at once.”
Mr Chua eventually started suffering from burnout. Although he continued working because “it was all he knew”, the gradual burnout affected his relationships with his former business partner as well as staff.
Once, after a particularly busy Friday night, his workers wanted to boycott their next shift as they could not stand him shouting and screaming at them over every little thing.
So when the landlord at Neil Road wanted to increase the rent by a whopping 60%, Mr Chua knew it was time to close shop. At that point, he needed a break.
But the lack of work, while initially welcome, became a pressure point because of all the family expenses he had to pay for.
“Imagine a ’16 hours guy’ suddenly becoming ‘zero hours’,” he explained. “I was still in denial. I was still enjoying (my free time) until kid’s (expenses) came in, and then everything started crumbling.”
Although Mr Chua’s wife, an educator, was shouldering the finances, it was a struggle for them.
“My wife also started saying that I really need a job,” he revealed.
Mentally shaken by everything that was happening, Mr Chua started receiving free counselling at the James Cook University Psychology Clinic.
At the same time, he also started saving money and drastically cut down on his expenses, to the point where he’d spend just S$3 a day.
The following month, he started home-based cooking three times a week. While that brought in a good amount of income thanks to the reputation he’d built, it was not enough.
Even coaching at a gym did not help with his finances as much as he liked.
Mr Chua remained depressed and even attempted suicide at least twice. “I kept thinking, when will I resume my job? When will I be able to lighten my wife’s load?”
He admitted these six months were the “darkest period” of his life as he went from working constantly to not knowing what to do with his life.
Finally, in March, renovations on the Wild Crumbs space were completed and business could properly begin.
But unlike in the past, Mr Chua would not cook.
After years in the kitchen, at points even being a one-man kitchen show at Beng Who Cooks, Mr Chua was ready to hand over the kitchen grill and focus on floor management.
Besides Mr Chong, the cook, he also has a secretary who takes care of other back-end matters.
Compared to the rent at Neil Road, Mr Chua said the rented space in the vicinity of one-north is more manageable, with several pros to boot.
For one, Mr Chua wouldn’t have to clean the toilet. The space is also larger, being able to fit up to 60 customers as opposed to 46 at Beng Who Cooks.
Rather than work 16 hours a day like he used to, Mr Chua took drastic steps to ensure burnout would not occur again.
For example, the location and type of food served are meant to appeal to a lunchtime office crowd, who can easily grab a sandwich and leave quickly.
Hence, lunchtime is the only busy period at Wild Crumbs.
By 3pm, the kitchen is closed and only desserts and drinks are served, and by 4pm, Mr Chua closes up for the day.
This leaves him the evening to work at his other part-time jobs, such as boxing coaching, as the business is still very new and he needs to earn more to support his family.
“I promised my wife, ‘You let me work five days a week, I will concentrate fully on work. Then on weekends, I will spend time with the family,'” he said.
He’d rather take in less money from Wild Crumbs and allow himself and his staff to have a proper life outside of work. He declared,
I am trying to change the whole culinary industry.
Mr Chua has seen many kitchen staff leave, not because of a lack of passion, but to seek more work-life balance in another industry.
Therefore, he wants the people who work at Wild Crumbs to get decent pay while still maintaining a life outside of work.
“I’m a family man, that’s why I strive for work-life balance,” he emphasised.
Despite his words, however, he sees himself returning to the sort of work schedule where he’d get just three to four hours of sleep “after one year” as he believes he’ll inevitably look to expand Wild Crumbs beyond their present location.
Ambition is simply in his blood, he shrugged. Within 18 months, he’s going to enact his expansion plans.
He knows more than most that manpower is an issue that is severely plaguing the F&B industry, so holding on to staff and eventually grooming them into people he can trust and giving them the wings to take charge is paramount.
Beng Who Cooks might be a social media personality, but Mr Chua said that with him, what you see is what you get.
From his expletive-laden sentences to even getting demonetised on TikTok because he walked around in the nude on stream, Mr Chua does not believe in censoring anything about himself.
Though he does not make money from social media, he still enjoys making videos and talking about anything he fancies. Like his ambition and workaholic tendencies, he can’t help but talk to people.
Even while working the floor, he’d talk to his staff and customers, cracking jokes constantly while making coffee and serving food.
Mr Chua also doubles as Wild Crumbs’ marketing and sales manager, running its social media account, meeting prospective clients, and organising special events, where he makes a now-rare appearance in the kitchen.
You may or may not be surprised to hear that the Beng Who Cares Foundation, which Mr Chua set up to feed those in need during the pandemic, is still going strong.
He shared with us that his major goal by the end of 2023 is to raise S$4,000 to bring a busload of kids, in collaboration with CARE Singapore, to Universal Studios Singapore for a day of fun.
Not only that, he wants to give the kids an allowance to enjoy a 20-inch pizza and buy souvenirs while there.
His motivation stems from his belief that children are the future.
I keep telling myself, regardless of how rich or successful I am, I must be willing to give back and to help the future, which is the kids.
Having turned a corner in his life in his early 30s, Mr Chua is now better able to prioritise his life apart from simply working all day for the sake of it.
As much as he loves working, he now spends less time than before on work and allocates his weekends to family and any extra free time on his foundation.
“I don’t believe in splitting my work fifty-fifty . . . weekdays from nine to five, it’s all work. After that, I spend that extra hour on the foundation or accounting. Then when I do coaching, (I give it) 100%.”
It may be tiring, but Mr Chua said it’s worth it because he’s working towards his goals. It’s just his tunnel vision again, he quipped.
So if you’re in the area and looking for an easy lunch with coffee and a sando, you can catch Mr Chua at Wild Crumbs here:
Wild Crumbs Singapore
Address: 8A Biomedical Grove, #01-17/18, Singapore 138648
Opening hours: 10am-4pm (Monday to Friday)
Nearest MRT station: Buona Vista
Social media: Instagram
If you or anyone you know needs someone to speak to, do not hesitate to reach out to Samaritans of Singapore via their hotline at 1800-221-4444.
Have news you must share? Get in touch with us via email at news@mustsharenews.com.
Featured image by MS News. Photography by Gavin Chua.
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