Martin Ong: The Western-Trained Chef Who Spent Years Perfecting Char Siew

Martin Ong did not learn roast meats through a family hawker stall.

He was not born into generations of Cantonese roast masters.

He was originally trained in Western cooking.

Then, after working in restaurants, Ong decided that what he really wanted to sell was char siew and sio bak.

So he taught himself.

What followed was years of experimentation with pork, marinades, ovens, temperature and technique — eventually producing the deeply caramelised char siew and unusually crisp roast pork that became the foundation of 88 Hong Kong Roast Meat Specialist.

Ong's story is therefore not simply about a successful roast-meat business.

It is about a chef crossing culinary traditions, learning a specialised craft largely through experimentation, and becoming so particular about the result that expansion had to wait until other cooks could reproduce his standards.

For Martin Ong, reputation comes before growth.

And the meat comes before almost everything else.

A Western Chef Before the Roast Meats

Before becoming known for char siew, Ong worked in Western kitchens.

His earlier career included time at Jack's Place and The Canopy Café at Marina Bay Golf Course.

That background makes his later specialisation particularly interesting.

Unlike chefs such as Yoshio Sakuta, whose careers develop through increasingly deep immersion within one culinary discipline, Ong effectively crossed over.

Western cooking gave way to Cantonese-style roast meats.

But the first education did not simply disappear.

Years later, when discussing his sio bak, Ong would hint that elements of his Western culinary training had found their way into the preparation.

That makes his cooking less a story of abandoning one cuisine for another than of carrying techniques across the boundary between them.

Starting Again as a Hawker

Ong entered the roast-meat business in 2012.

His first stall was called Cross Way Bay and operated in Tampines.

From there, his career became unusually mobile.

He opened Tong Tong Hong Kong Delicacy in Johor Bahru, found the market there unsuitable for what he wanted to sell, returned to Singapore, operated in Bukit Batok, moved to Foch Road and later established 88 Hong Kong Roast Meat Specialist at Tyrwhitt Road.

The repeated relocations earned him something of a reputation as a nomadic roast-meat hawker.

But at least one move had a highly practical explanation.

He needed more kitchen space.

Ong's production depended upon multiple ovens, and as demand increased, the physical requirements of making enough roast meat increased with it.

At one stage, his modified ovens were handling around 100 kilograms of pork belly a day.

The little roast-meat stall was becoming an operation.

Learning Roast Meat Through Experimentation

Ong has said that developing his own roasting technique took years of experimentation.

That is worth emphasising.

Roast meats can appear deceptively straightforward when hanging behind the glass of a hawker stall.

Pork goes into an oven.

Roast pork comes out.

The real process is considerably more sensitive.

The meat has to cook through without drying.

Fat needs time to render.

Char siew needs enough heat to create caramelisation without simply burning the sugars on its surface.

Sio bak presents another problem entirely: the skin needs to become brittle and crisp while the layers of meat and fat underneath remain succulent.

This is where Ong's approach begins to resemble the intense relationship with heat found in a very different form at Burnt Ends.

Dave Pynt works with grills, ovens and open fire.

Ong works with roast-meat ovens and charcoal.

The cuisines have almost nothing in common.

The underlying obsession does.

Heat has to be controlled.

The Sio Bak Problem

Sio bak is one of the clearest examples of Ong's technical focus.

The skin is supposed to crack.

Not merely become firm.

Not leathery.

Not unpleasantly hard.

It should break with a brittle crispness while the pork underneath remains moist.

Ong developed his own slow-roasting method over the years, and later accounts of 88 Hong Kong Roast Meat described a process lasting more than two hours.

His seasoning also differs from many conventional roast-pork preparations.

Ong has said that he uses very little five-spice powder and does not rely on fermented bean curd in the way some roast masters do.

He has also alluded to incorporating Western culinary elements into the method without revealing the complete technique.

That secrecy is understandable.

By this stage, the sio bak was no longer simply another item at the stall.

It was one of the things upon which 88 Hong Kong Roast Meat's reputation had been built.

Then There Is the Char Siew

If the sio bak demonstrates Ong's obsession with texture, the char siew demonstrates his willingness to move between traditions.

His version sits somewhere between Hong Kong and Malaysian styles.

Hong Kong-style roast pork often leans towards ingredients such as hoisin and fermented bean curd.

Malaysian char siew tends to push further towards sweetness and caramelisation through honey, maltose and similar ingredients.

Ong's rendition draws from both directions.

The pork is cut relatively thick, retaining fat and moisture inside while developing deeply caramelised edges on the exterior.

The result has even been compared with bak kwa because of the combination of smoke, sweetness and caramelised pork.

That is not accidental hybridity.

It reflects the way Ong cooks.

He studies a technique, experiments with it, then builds the version he wants rather than treating one regional standard as untouchable.

It is an approach seen in very different ways elsewhere in Singapore. At Bottega di Carna, contemporary Italian cooking similarly involves deciding which traditions remain fixed and where a chef permits himself room to move.

Ong does it with pork.

Charcoal Still Matters

As 88 Hong Kong Roast Meat developed, charcoal roasting remained an important part of the identity.

Charcoal does more than provide heat.

Used properly, it introduces aroma while helping create the intense surface cooking required for caramelisation.

But charcoal is also less convenient than simply standardising everything around modern electric equipment.

Its heat changes.

It requires management.

It produces smoke.

It adds another variable to a process Ong already monitors closely.

That willingness to preserve an inconvenient element because of what it contributes to the finished food says something about his priorities.

Efficiency matters.

But not at the expense of the thing customers came to eat.

“Everything You Cook, You Must Be Satisfied With It”

Ong has been unusually clear about the principle governing his business.

Speaking to 8days when 88 Hong Kong Roast Meat expanded into the CBD, he explained that a chef needed principles.

His standard was essentially this:

Do not serve something you are not satisfied with.

For Ong, reputation is the valuable asset.

That philosophy makes sense when placed beside his career.

He spent years perfecting roast meat before the business became famous.

He modified equipment rather than accepting what was available.

He kept production concentrated rather than rapidly opening outlets.

And even after demand made expansion commercially attractive, he resisted moving faster than his kitchen could support.

That attitude has parallels with the precision found at Sushi Sakuta, despite the enormous difference between an omakase counter and a plate of roast pork rice.

In both cases, consistency is part of the product.

The customer should not have to wonder which version of the chef's food they will receive today.

Why Expansion Was Slow

By the early 2020s, Ong had little difficulty attracting customers.

The Lavender operation drew substantial lunch crowds, and a significant number of those customers were travelling from Singapore's CBD.

Opening closer to them seemed obvious.

Ong still waited.

His explanation was revealing.

The problem was not demand.

It was production and people.

He needed cooks capable of meeting the standard.

Ong described himself as extremely particular and said he would only open another outlet once the appropriate staff had been trained.

At the Lavender flagship, several cooks he described as his disciples were responsible for maintaining roast-meat production.

That word matters.

Ong had begun as a chef teaching himself how to roast meat.

Years later, his challenge was teaching the system to somebody else.

Turning Instinct Into a System

This is one of the most difficult stages in the career of any cook who becomes a restaurateur.

A chef can personally produce excellent food through accumulated experience.

A business has to reproduce that food when the chef is not standing over every plate.

Suddenly, intuition has to become procedure.

How long does the pork roast?

At what temperature?

How thick should it be cut?

How much marinade?

What should correctly rendered fat look like?

When is caramelisation enough?

Which batch is not good enough to sell?

Ong had to take years of personal experimentation and turn those decisions into something another cook could learn.

That challenge is quite different from the chef-led model seen with figures such as Shintaro Hozumi, where craft can remain closely concentrated around the individual chef.

88 Hong Kong Roast Meat needed eventually to exist beyond Martin Ong's two hands.

From Hawker Stall to Restaurant

In March 2023, Ong opened 88 Hong Kong Roast Meat Specialist's first air-conditioned restaurant at Far East Square.

It represented a substantial physical change.

Instead of queueing at a traditional coffeeshop stall, customers could eat the same roast meats inside a large air-conditioned CBD restaurant.

The food, however, remained recognisably connected to the hawker operation.

Char siew.

Sio bak.

Roast duck.

Rice.

Noodles.

Wantons.

Even with the change of environment, Ong resisted turning the concept into an elaborate restaurant experience.

The move was closer to giving the hawker business a more comfortable room.

This is an interesting contrast with restaurants such as KOMA Singapore, where the physical dining environment is deliberately part of the spectacle.

At 88 Hong Kong Roast Meat, the attraction has always been much more direct.

Look at the meat.

Order it.

Eat.

The Restaurant Did Not Need to Make the Meat Expensive

The move into a CBD restaurant could also have provided an obvious opportunity to reposition the food at substantially higher prices.

Ong largely resisted that.

When the Far East Square restaurant opened, the roast-meat platters were reportedly priced the same as at his coffeeshop operations, while some rice and noodle dishes received relatively modest increases.

That decision is consistent with the broader logic of his career.

Ong did not appear interested in using his reputation to transform roast meat into luxury food.

He wanted the restaurant to sell what made 88 Hong Kong Roast Meat successful in the first place.

The environment became more comfortable.

The pork did not suddenly need a white tablecloth.

A Chef Who Became a Specialist by Choice

Martin Ong's career is particularly interesting because the word specialist in 88 Hong Kong Roast Meat Specialist describes something he deliberately became.

He did not begin there.

He came from Western restaurant cooking.

Then he chose a narrow category and went deeper.

Char siew.

Sio bak.

Roast duck.

Noodles.

Rice.

Years of adjustments to ovens, cooking times, seasoning and technique followed.

That makes him almost the reverse of a chef such as Roberto Galbiati, whose broad restaurant career developed within the culinary framework he had grown up with.

Ong crossed into another cooking tradition and decided to master it on his own terms.

What Martin Ong's Food Philosophy Looks Like

Ong does not need an elaborate manifesto.

His decisions make the philosophy fairly clear.

Technique can be learned.

He was not born a roast-meat specialist.

He became one.

Traditions can overlap.

His char siew borrows characteristics from Hong Kong and Malaysian roasting, while his Western training appears in less obvious parts of his cooking.

Growth should follow consistency.

He resisted rapid expansion because his production and staff had to be ready first.

Reputation is worth protecting.

If the food does not satisfy the chef, it should not reach the customer.

And perhaps most importantly:

A familiar dish is worth taking seriously.

There is nothing obscure about char siew and sio bak in Singapore.

That did not prevent Ong from spending years trying to make them better.

The Man Behind 88 Hong Kong Roast Meat

The queues, restaurants and media attention make it easy to view 88 Hong Kong Roast Meat Specialist primarily as a successful F&B brand.

Martin Ong's story is more interesting when taken back to its beginning.

A Western-trained cook decided he wanted to sell Chinese roast meat.

He experimented.

He failed.

He adjusted.

He modified his ovens.

He moved stalls.

He roasted more pork.

He kept changing the method until the texture and flavour matched what he believed the food should be.

Then customers started following him from address to address.

By the time 88 Hong Kong Roast Meat became large enough for an air-conditioned restaurant, the most important part of the business had already been established.

Not the location.

Not the name.

Not even the queues.

The standard.

Martin Ong spent years building it.

Everything else came afterwards.