When siblings Tay Jia Ling and Tay Jia Han walked away from their six-figure corporate salaries to revive their parents’ nameless cai png stall, they didn’t just start a business—they sparked a conversation about what we’re willing to sacrifice for meaning, heritage, and family in modern Singapore.
The Price of Meaning in a High-Cost City
The numbers are staggering. Both siblings earned six-figure annual salaries—Jia Ling as Head of Product in tech after 12 years, Jia Han with nine years managing restaurant branches in the UK. They made a pact to draw no income for the first year. In Singapore, where the cost of living ranks among the world’s highest, this isn’t just brave—it’s almost reckless.
Yet their decision reflects a growing tension in Singapore’s workforce. Despite high salaries and career prestige, burnout and the search for purpose are driving professionals to radical career pivots. The siblings represent a quiet rebellion against the corporate ladder—not because they failed to climb it, but because they succeeded and still felt empty.
“We’ve exchanged that to find meaning in work,” Jia Han stated simply. That exchange—money for meaning—is becoming increasingly common among millennials and Gen Z professionals who watched their parents work themselves to exhaustion.
Preserving Culinary Heritage in the Digital Age
For nearly 20 years, the Tay parents operated without even a signboard. Customers knew them simply as “the cai png at Tampines Street 22, Block 280.” When the stall closed in 2014, a piece of neighborhood history vanished—one of countless hawker stalls that disappear each year as Singapore grapples with an aging hawker population and few successors.
The siblings’ revival as Curry Kong represents more than nostalgia. By starting as a home-based business leveraging digital platforms, they’ve created a modern blueprint for heritage preservation. They spent six months conducting blind taste tests with 40 participants, refining their parents’ 30-dish repertoire down to seven signature items, and building a digital presence before ever opening a physical location.
This approach challenges the traditional hawker model. Instead of immediately taking over a stall and hoping customers remember, they’ve built demand first, gathered data on customer preferences and locations, and plan to open strategically in the East where their customer base already exists. It’s heritage food meets startup methodology.
The Generational Business Model Clash
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of their story is the friction between generations. “Disagreements are not so much between me and my brother, but more of how our parents’ generation runs a business versus how we see things,” Jia Ling acknowledged.
This conflict plays out in hawker centers across Singapore. The older generation operates on instinct, personal relationships, and grueling hours—opening early, closing late, no days off. The younger generation brings data analytics, customer feedback loops, brand building, and sustainability concerns.
The Tay siblings have attempted a delicate balance. They currently operate 12-hour days, seven days a week—a concession to their parents’ work ethic and their belief that early exposure is crucial. But they’ve also implemented shift rotations and plan to eventually reduce hours and introduce rest days. They’re trying to honor tradition while preventing the burnout that drove them from corporate life in the first place.
The Home-Based Business Dilemma
Curry Kong’s home-based model has sparked controversy. Some criticize home-based food businesses for having lower overhead and fewer regulations than traditional hawker stalls, creating an unfair competitive advantage.
Jia Ling acknowledges both sides. Yes, overhead is lower. But “you wake up and go to sleep with the entire business right in front of your room,” she notes. Their executive flat is now primarily storage for inventory and packaging. Work-life boundaries have dissolved entirely. Scaling is severely limited.
The home-based model is both opportunity and trap. It allows heritage recipes to survive without the prohibitive costs of rent and renovation, enabling experimentation and gradual growth. But it also creates unsustainable living conditions that can’t last indefinitely. The siblings plan to open a physical store by Q3 or Q4 2025—a recognition that home-based is a starting point, not an end goal.
Redefining Success Beyond Profit
What’s most striking about the Curry Kong story is how it redefines success. In Singapore’s achievement-oriented culture, walking away from corporate prestige and high salaries to sell $8.90 curry rice plates seems like failure. The siblings are clear-eyed about the sacrifice—they’re currently drawing no salary at all.
Yet they’ve gained something intangible: agency over their time, connection to their heritage, collaboration with family, and the satisfaction of building something with their own hands. When former customers’ children—now adults—recognize the familiar flavors from childhood and reach out via social media, that’s a form of success no corporate promotion can match.
Their story challenges Singapore’s productivity-obsessed narrative. Not everything worth doing generates immediate profit. Some things—preserving family recipes, keeping traditions alive, creating community—have value that spreadsheets can’t capture.
The Ripple Effect on Singapore’s Food Culture
The implications extend beyond one family. If more children of hawkers see viable pathways to continue their parents’ legacies—using modern business models, digital platforms, and flexible formats—Singapore’s hawker culture might survive its existential crisis.
The National Environment Agency reports that the average hawker is 59 years old. Within a generation, much of Singapore’s food heritage could vanish. Stories like Curry Kong’s offer hope, but also highlight the challenges: it requires financial cushion, family support, willingness to sacrifice income, and entrepreneurial skills.
Not every hawker’s child has these resources. The Tay siblings had savings from high-paying jobs, supportive parents willing to teach them, and professional experience in product management, marketing, and F&B operations. Their success may not be easily replicable.
The Unseen Emotional Labor
What often goes unmentioned in entrepreneurship stories is the emotional toll. Jia Han admits that working with immediate family requires carefully considering “the emotions and the kind of words that you’re about to say.” The siblings live with their parents, work with them daily, and have their home consumed by the business.
The plan to eventually “transition their parents out of the business” hangs unspoken in the air—a recognition that the parent-child dynamic becomes even more complex when parents must step back from something they built.
There’s also the weight of representation. They’re not just running a business—they’re carrying forward their parents’ 20-year legacy and the memories of customers who ate there as children. That’s pressure beyond quarterly targets.
A New Model for Heritage Preservation
Curry Kong represents a potential model for heritage preservation in Singapore: digital-first, data-driven, starting small, building community, and then expanding to physical presence. It’s how a tech-savvy generation might save traditions their parents built.
But it also reveals uncomfortable truths. Heritage preservation in a high-cost city requires privilege—savings, education, family support. The hawkers who most need succession plans may be the ones whose children can’t afford to take the risk.
The siblings acknowledge they’re fortunate their parents could help them start this “business revival.” Not every hawker family has this option. Some children are in their own financial struggles. Others have moved overseas. Some simply don’t want the life they watched exhaust their parents.
Looking Forward
As Curry Kong prepares to open its first physical store, the siblings face new questions. Can they maintain quality while scaling? Will customers who love the home-based charm embrace a commercial space? Can they honor their parents’ legacy while making it sustainable for a new generation?
Their story isn’t a simple one of triumph—it’s ongoing, uncertain, filled with trade-offs. They’ve exchanged financial security for meaning, corporate structure for family chaos, work-life balance for complete integration of work and life.
But in doing so, they’ve proven that heritage doesn’t have to die with the generation that created it. With adaptation, sacrifice, and a willingness to blend old and new, traditions can evolve and survive.
Whether Curry Kong becomes a thriving business or a cautionary tale, the siblings have already achieved something valuable: they’ve shown that it’s possible to choose meaning over money, heritage over prestige, and family over career—even in pragmatic, expensive, achievement-focused Singapore.
That choice, and the conversation it sparks about what we value beyond paychecks, may be their most lasting impact of all.
The question facing Singapore now isn’t whether more children will follow the Tay siblings’ path—it’s whether we’ll create conditions that make such choices sustainable, rather than requiring heroic sacrifice.