When Mohammed Noorman Bin Mubarak Ahmad opened his first hawker stall in 2017, he woke up at 2:45 a.m., after just three hours of sleep.
While most of Singapore slumbered, he cooked spicy sambal and marinated chicken and stocked up his tiny stall for a busy day. He squeezed the prep in before his oil and gas job, then ran back after work to serve dinner.
The long hours in front of the stove were a sharp departure from his cushy job as a flight attendant with Singapore Airlines.
Noorman’s early alarms and career pivots paid off. Eight years later, he has expanded the first stall into a chain business featured in the Michelin Guide.
Seven years travelling the world, and feeling unfulfilled
Noorman, now 46, has been working in kitchens since he was six.
His father used to run a hawker stall, and he helped out before and after school. After studying a degree in Business Management in Australia, he came back to help his father with the stall, which sold Malay food. After many disagreements on how to run it, he decided he needed a break.
“I just needed to get out,” he said. He joined Singapore Airlines as an air steward.
His seven years working as a flight attendant for Singapore Airlines, from 2004 to 2011, were glamorous as he flew to South Africa and Europe. He said he was paid about 5,000 Singapore dollars monthly in the role.
“I thought, this is the life. I’m not going to get married anymore. I’m going to stay single and travel,” Noorman said. “For seven years, I forgot about all the things that I learned and aspired to be.”
Eventually, a sense of emptiness crept in.
“The job was too easy. Just asking, ‘Do you want coffee or tea, chicken or whatever?‘” he said. “I didn’t need to have done a degree for it.”
In 2011, he quit his job at Singapore Airlines and worked a maintenance gig at an oil and gas company in Singapore. Shortly after he quit his job, he met his now wife, who was also a flight attendant at the time.
He stayed there for seven more years, working his way up to a managerial role.
Setting up Nasi Lemak Ayam Taliwang
Still, he wanted to build something of his own. And when Yishun Park Hawker Centre was under construction, right in front of his house, he decided to take the leap.
He got a friend to partner with him, and they each put SG$20,000 of their savings into the stall. He started Nasi Lemak Ayam Taliwang in 2017.
Noorman decided to add a twist to the classic nasi lemak recipe. His wife, who is Indonesian, whipped up a mean ayam taliwang — a spicy grilled chicken dish — so they decided to combine the two.
For the first few months, business was slow. He said he earned less than SG$5,000 monthly, which felt like a huge step back.
“I didn’t want to be earning the same amount as I did about 10 years back, and working double the hours,” he said.
He ran the stall while working his 9-to-5 job at the oil and gas company, meaning he would come back to the stall after work and feed a hungry dinner crowd until 10 p.m. Then he got up the next morning to prep before work.
“The thought of working almost 18 hours a day, every day, for the next two to three years, that was the most challenging,” Noorman said.
The business was also hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw Singapore go into a full lockdown.
Then, in 2021, his stall was included in the Michelin Guide.
Sales started picking up, and Noorman scaled up massively.
Now, Nasi Lemak Ayam Taliwang has 31 stores around the island city, including one in the food court in the glitzy Marina Bay Sands mall. He said daily sales for each of his stalls range from SG$800 to SG$4,000.
A spicy dish with tender meat and fragrant rice
When I visited Noorman’s first stall in Yishun Park Hawker Centre, I tried the SG$7.60 Nasi Lemak Ayam Taliwang, the most popular item.
Nasi lemak is a rice dish with origins in Malaysia, served with roasted peanuts, an egg, anchovies, a sweet and spicy chili paste called sambal, and cucumber slices.
The staff ladled a generous heap of chili paste onto the grilled chicken. The spice did not overpower the savory marinade.
The meat was tender and fell off the bone. The sambal added sweetness to the dish, and the jammy egg made it rich and creamy.
Jay Sim, a regular who has been buying the stall’s SG$6.60 double chicken wings set fortnightly for about five months, said it’s one of the best nasi lemak stalls he’s tried in Singapore.
Sim, a 21-year-old TikTok streamer, said the chicken was always crispy, and the rice, flavored with pandan leaves, was fragrant.
Hands off the stove, and happier than ever
Now, with a workforce of about a hundred people manning his 31 outlets, Noorman said he has not picked up a ladle in six months.
“If you have the opportunity to sit down, relax, play golf, travel, and still get paid, you will want to do that rather than work in a hawker center for 18 hours,” he said.
But it was important to carry on his family’s hawker legacy and pass it down to his children.
“It’s so tiring, my feet were always sore,” he said. “But I did it because I want to create this legacy.”
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