Eric Kee: The Hawker Who Saw a Place for Steamed Fish for One
For Eric Kee, the story of Nian Nian You Yu was never simply about learning how to steam fish. It was about understanding what people actually needed from a hawker stall.
When Kee and his friend Issac Lim opened Nian Nian You Yu at Maxwell Food Centre in April 2022, their proposition was remarkably straightforward: take the familiar Chinese experience of eating steamed fish and make it practical for one person.
The stall has since closed permanently. But the thinking behind it — and Kee's route into hawker entrepreneurship — makes his story worth revisiting.
Growing Up Around the Business of Food
Kee was a first-time hawker when Nian Nian You Yu opened, but he was hardly new to food and beverage.
His family operated a kopitiam in Yishun, where he had worked full-time in management before striking out with a business of his own. That experience gave Kee a different foundation from his business partner.
Lim came from professional kitchens. Kee came from the operational side of everyday F&B.
The two had known each other since National Service, and when the opportunity to start something together emerged, their respective strengths complemented one another. Kee told 8days that he trusted Lim's cooking experience and had already wanted to start a food business himself.
At Nian Nian You Yu, the division of labour initially reflected those backgrounds. Lim handled the cooking while Kee managed much of what happened around it: taking orders, dealing with suppliers and handling marketing. Their fish supplier was itself a close friend.
It is an important distinction. A hawker business is not sustained by cooking alone. Procurement, customer flow, pricing, communication and the hundred small decisions surrounding a plate of food matter just as much.
Kee understood that side of the equation.
Finding a Gap at the Zi Char Table
The idea behind Nian Nian You Yu reportedly emerged during something considerably less glamorous than a business strategy meeting: a zi char meal.
Kee and Lim were eating a whole steamed fish when they noticed something about the format.
Steamed fish in Singapore is overwhelmingly communal. A whole fish arrives in the middle of the table, surrounded by family, friends or colleagues. It works beautifully when four or six people are eating together.
It makes considerably less sense when someone is having lunch alone.
“We realised that most places only offer whole fish and they cater to bigger groups,” Kee explained in the original interview. The pair believed there was an opportunity to serve steamed fish to individuals instead.
That observation became the central idea behind Nian Nian You Yu.
Rather than reinventing steamed fish, they changed its scale.
Making Steamed Fish an Everyday Meal
At launch, individual diners could order portions of sea bass or golden pomfret with rice and soup rather than committing to an entire fish.
The standard preparation leaned towards familiar Hong Kong-style flavours, using soy sauce, ginger and chicken stock. A Thai-inspired alternative introduced garlic, chilli and lime. Seafood such as clams, tiger prawns and grouper appeared alongside vegetables and steamed egg.
The food therefore occupied an interesting middle ground.
It wasn't restaurant cooking transplanted wholesale into a hawker centre. Nor was it an attempt to make steamed fish unfamiliar for the sake of novelty. The more meaningful innovation was accessibility: portion size, price, speed and suitability for the office worker eating alone.
That tells us something about Kee's approach to food.
His contribution was grounded in practicality.
The question wasn't simply what can we cook? It was what can people realistically order here?
Learning the Cooking Side
Kee did not begin the venture as a trained cook.
That was never disguised.
Instead, Lim began teaching him how to clean, prepare and steam fish during quieter periods at the stall. The longer-term intention was for Kee to become capable of running the cooking operation himself, allowing the partners eventually to operate separate outlets.
There is something particularly hawker-like about that progression.
Kee's education in food did not begin with culinary school or the brigade system of a professional restaurant. It came through the business itself: suppliers, customers, operations and, eventually, learning the physical craft required to produce the food.
Nian Nian You Yu therefore became both a business and a working culinary apprenticeship.
Designing Food Around the Hawker Stall
The small menu also reflected the realities of the space.
With only two people working from a compact hawker unit, the partners deliberately limited what they attempted. Much of the menu was designed around a commercial tiered steamer rather than requiring an extensive collection of cooking equipment.
This was not limitation for its own sake. It was operational discipline.
A successful hawker concept has to survive contact with rent, utilities, labour, queues, preparation time and a tiny kitchen.
Early indications suggested that customers understood the proposition. The partners told 8days that sales grew from roughly 60 sets per day to around 100 after attention from food-related social media groups. Later coverage described substantial queues at the stall.
The concept had found an audience.
What Nian Nian You Yu Says About Eric Kee's Food Philosophy
Kee did not leave behind a manifesto about cooking, so it would be misleading to manufacture one for him.
But his decisions reveal a philosophy of their own.
Food should fit the people eating it.
The individually portioned fish was a response to the solo diner. The streamlined menu responded to the constraints of a two-person operation. The reliance on steaming suited the equipment available. His partnership with a professionally trained chef allowed each founder to contribute from a different area of experience.
Even the original idea came from noticing an inconvenience in an ordinary meal.
That is a particularly pragmatic form of food entrepreneurship: observe how people eat, identify what does not quite work for them, and change the format without losing the character of the dish.
A Short-Lived Stall, but an Interesting Idea
Nian Nian You Yu did not become the multi-outlet operation its founders initially imagined.
The stall relocated within Maxwell Food Centre in late 2022 and reopened in December. By 2023, however, it had permanently closed. Coverage of the closure noted that the stall's social media bio simply announced that it was “closed for good” without publicly explaining the reason. Reports also indicated that the business had continued attracting customers before its closure.
That distinction matters.
The end of Nian Nian You Yu should not be retroactively treated as the definition of Kee's story, nor should an unexplained closure invite speculation about what happened between its founders.
What remains documented is much more useful.
Eric Kee was a young F&B operator who came from a family kopitiam, wanted to build something of his own and partnered with a friend whose culinary experience complemented his own operational background. Together, they recognised that one of Singapore's most familiar communal dishes could be rethought around a changing dining habit: eating alone.
For a brief period at Maxwell Food Centre, steamed fish no longer required a family gathered around the table.
One person could simply order it for lunch.
And that small shift in perspective is perhaps the most interesting part of Eric Kee's contribution to Nian Nian You Yu.
