March 16, 2009
monday interview with Veronica Tan
Hostess with the mostest
The thorny question pops up midway over a casual dinner at the upmarket Cantonese restaurant Peach Garden in Thomson Plaza.
'Do you like durians?' asks Ms Veronica Tan, 51, one of the partners of the Peach Garden chain.
Your eyes widen and you ask where she buys hers from. The tatty stall in a parking lot in Dempsey Road, she says, adding that she has been a customer for 17 years.
In the excitement - talk of food fires her up - she suggests swinging by the makeshift kiosk after dinner and quickly calls the owner, whom she calls Ah Di (Hokkien for little brother), to make a reservation.
She is a regular because she likes that Ah Di remains focused on the customer he is serving even when others jostle for attention. The durians he has sold her have never disappointed either.
You suspect, however, that the affinity runs deeper since Ah Di's service mirrors her warm hospitality, which defines the Peach Garden experience.
Unlike other restaurateurs who leave the day-to-day operations to their staff, she splits her time between the three outlets, including OCBC Centre and Novena Gardens, greeting guests in her honeyed alto with a genuine warmth.
But she does more than chin wag. She takes orders, asks if guests would like the chef to do something special and checks that they are enjoying the food.
She even goes to the length of brainstorming with her dim sum chef on how to make monkey-shaped longevity buns specially for the birthday of a five-year- old customer born in the Year of the Monkey.
And when she knows that a regular customer who loves pineapples will be dining at the restaurant, she zips to a market in Telok Kurau to buy the fruit from a reputable fruit stall, so that she can surprise him with juicy pineapples at the end of his meal.
It is this service par excellence, honed from more than 30 years in the hotel restaurant industry, that has won Peach Garden an ardent following among businessmen, celebrities and the man in the street.
Indeed, the customer loyalty it inspires helped the restaurant pull through the traumatic Sars outbreak, which hit just four months after it opened two outlets in Novena Gardens and Eastwood Centre in Bedok in late 2002.
The two units came as part of a package deal. They moved the Eastwood outlet to a bigger unit in Thomson Plaza in 2005.
Expanding the business
The three restaurants, known for serving refined Cantonese cuisine and signature dishes such as double-boiled shark's bone cartilage soup, were acquired last December by home-grown food caterer Select Group for $10.2 million.
The sum, which includes $3.2 million in Select shares and $4 million cash upfront, is split among the restaurant's seven shareholders. The remaining $3 million is to be paid over three years if profit targets of $1.8 million a year are met.
Tease her about the tidy amount she must have made from the deal and she brushes it away coyly, saying she has pocketed only 'a little bit' of it.
She adds that she has been shy about going to the wet market near her home after news of the buy-over broke because the hawkers, whom she is friendly with, joke about her windfall.
Ask if it is enough for her to retire comfortably and she says the thought never crossed her mind because her decision to relinquish ownership of the restaurant was driven by a desire to expand the business.
'We want to bring Peach Garden to the next level for our customers,' she says. 'And Select can help us do that by providing the support.'
Already, a fourth outlet is opening next month at Orchid Country Club and she is gearing up for its launch.
As the number of Peach Garden restaurants increases, however, will her personal touch be lost?
She says: 'The way we groom our staff is very important. The way we behave, the way we talk to our customers, they watch, learn and do.'
She would know since that was how her early years as a service staff member at the then Holiday Inn hotel in Scotts Road (now Royal Plaza on Scotts) taught her to become the hostess with the mostess.
She joined the hotel as a waitress at its Cafe Vienna outlet after finishing her O levels at the now defunct Hwi Yoh Secondary School. Her parents, a cook and a labourer, could not afford to pay for further education.
She observed that the captains and assistant captains in the restaurants had the entire menu at their fingertips. They also knew their customers' dietary likes and dislikes and could recommend dishes based on their tastes.
So to climb the ranks, she worked at memorising the menu and getting to know the diners better.
She also emulated the hotel's then food and beverage manager, Mr Ricky Goh.
'He was a very sharp manager,' she says. 'He would sit in a corner of the restaurant, read people and take in every thing that was happening.'
Indeed, this trait is so ingrained in her that over the supper of durians in Dempsey Road, you see her scanning the car park, noting the people who patronise the stall.
Even guests at Holiday Inn's restaurants became her teachers.
She paid attention to the way they interacted with one another and through it, learned how to engage everyone from corporate bigwigs to socialites in conversation.
Peach Garden restaurant manager Daniel Lee, 49, says he tries to learn from her management style.
'If Ms Tan sees you doing something wrong, she will tell you tactfully where you've gone wrong and set you back on track. This is something a manager should do, even if it means confronting the staff.'
Inspiration from Hong Kong
While these soft skills are an asset, they are not the sole reason for the success of Peach Garden.
Her mentor from Holiday Inn, Mr Goh, 58, now the chief executive officer of the Western restaurant and bakery chain Delifrance Asia, says: 'Veronica's strength is that she is entrepreneurial, always looking for opportunities and never fearful of hard work.'
This explains the trips she makes to Hong Kong every few months with her staff and restaurant partners to stay abreast of Cantonese culinary trends.
There, she dines at eateries recommended by her well-travelled Peach Garden clientele, seeking inspiration for new dishes to add to the restaurant's menu.
She pounds the Hong Kong food markets in the mornings to source for new and interesting ingredients too. Mi tong, a thin, short, tubular rice flour noodle, is one such find from the wet markets there that made its way onto Peach Garden's menu as a stir-fried dish accompanied with fragrant XO sauce.
Her eye for opportunity also prompted the creation of a promotional Sichuan cuisine menu that will be offered at its Thomson Plaza outlet soon.
She says: 'Cantonese food has been popular here for a long time now so people might want to try something different, something nostalgic.'
Sichuan cuisine was popular here before Cantonese restaurants became the rage in the 1990s.
Sichuan cooking is also close to her heart because it was a stint at Holiday Inn's Sichuan restaurant, Mei San, that sparked her partnership with Peach Garden's co-founder, Ms Angela Ho, 54.
The colleagues, both Hainanese and die-hard foodies, forged a steady friendship that saw them work together through other Sichuan restaurants including Goodwood Park Hotel's Min Jiang and Liu Xiang Lou at the former Taipan Hotel.
Indeed, their winning partnership and impressive people skills prompted Orchard Hotel to ask them to helm the pioneering team that opened its acclaimed Cantonese restaurant Hua Ting.
There, their reputation as impeccable restaurant managers grew through word of mouth among customers.
Ms Tan, however, says modestly that their success was possible because the restaurant had a good service crew backed by an excellent team of chefs.
While they enjoyed working at the restaurant, it was always Ms Ho's desire to own a restaurant, so after 12 years at Hua Ting, the inseparable duo ventured out to open Peach Garden.
The greatest challenge starting up the $700,000 restaurant funded by sleeping partners, says Ms Tan, was for Ms Ho and herself to get out of their comfort zone and learn to do everything else besides taking care of guests.
She says: 'When we ran hotel restaurants, we didn't have to worry about things such as managing accounts or housekeeping because there were other departments in charge of them.'
When news of Peach Garden's opening was announced through a favourable restaurant review in the papers, their former customers flocked over to support them. These customers also introduced friends to the restaurant, which helped them build up their own base of clients. Peach Garden broke even in three years.
Although there have been moments in the 30-year collaboration when the two disagreed, they have been able to weather it all.
Ms Ho says: 'Veronica has a quick temper but I don't, so we get along. Also, we don't bicker over power or fame. We stay focused on what's best for the restaurant.'
Ms Tan adds: 'Another reason we bond so well is that we are both very close to our mothers.'
Indeed, Ms Tan refers to her mother, Madam Woon, in conversation as 'my princess' and credits the 98-year-old for bringing up her children so well that she can concentrate on her career without any worries.
She has a daughter, Laura, 23, who is a Singapore Management University undergraduate, and son, Lionel, 19, who is serving national service. Her husband works in the shipping industry.
The youngest of five daughters, she says: 'My mother is very selfless. Even when she was in her 50s, she thought nothing of working as a roadside labourer to earn money for the family.'
Her late Hainanese father, who died in 1979, was a chef-for-hire who often cooked for dinners held by the Hainanese clan association. Due to the ad-hoc nature of his job, the family's income was irregular.
Madam Woon remains sprightly and lives with Ms Tan's family in a HDB four-room flat in the central part of Singapore.
She says her mother may be illiterate but is full of wise sayings. One of them, which she lives by, is, 'If your ladder goes only so high, you should climb only so far up the tree', a warning on the importance of striking a balance with ambition in life.
On this, however, Madam Woon has little to fret over her daughter.
With a carefully thought-out game plan on maintaining Peach Garden's personalised service and ensuring that the restaurant stays relevant to diners' tastebuds, the ladder in Ms Tan's orchard is certainly long enough for her to reach for the peaches.
my life so far
'Good memory is not inborn. It comes with practice. I used to train myself after work by recalling the events of the day and whom I spoke to'
Ms Tan on how she remembered diners' orders and dietary likes and dislikes before computers came along
'I always tell my upper management staff that they need to be like a hawk and an octopus. They need to be able to see everything that's happening in the restaurant and multi-task as a manager'
Her advice to staff
'I don't need a chef who can cook only abalone and sharks' fin. When I do food tastings (to hire chefs), I ask for fried rice, sweet and sour pork and lightly stir-fried greens. These may be simple dishes, but they are not easy to get right'
On how she assesses the new chefs she hires
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