Paul Liew and His Siblings: The Family Keeping Keng Eng Kee's Wok Burning

Paul Liew was never supposed to take over Keng Eng Kee Seafood.

Neither were his younger siblings.

Their parents understood exactly how difficult the hawker life could be because they had lived it themselves. Long hours. Physical work. Late nights. A business that followed the family home because there was rarely a meaningful separation between work and life.

So Paul, Wayne and Jia Min were given an education and encouraged to find something easier.

They came back anyway.

Today, the three siblings form the third generation behind Keng Eng Kee Seafood, or KEK — the Singapore zi char institution that began as a modest Havelock Road hawker stall in the 1970s and eventually found itself in the Michelin Guide, on Anthony Bourdain's television programme and on Netflix.

Paul became the business builder.

Wayne became the chef.

Jia Min became the operator.

But what makes their story particularly interesting is that none of them appears interested in transforming KEK into something unrecognisable in pursuit of growth.

The third generation's project has been more difficult than that.

Keep what the family inherited. Change what needs changing. And make sure there is still a fourth generation of customers who wants to eat it.

Before KEK Was a Restaurant

The story begins with the siblings' grandparents.

Paul's maternal grandparents migrated from Hainan to Singapore and began cooking for a living.

In the 1970s, the late Low Peck Yah and her husband operated a small stall at the old Havelock Road Hawker Centre, serving wok-cooked dishes for dinner and supper.

Vulcan Post's profile of the family traces the business from this modest first-generation operation through to the present-day KEK.

The original name was Keng Jong Kee.

When the Havelock hawker centre was demolished and the business moved to Alexandra Village in 1990, the name eventually became Keng Eng Kee.

By then, a second generation had taken over.

Their daughter, Koh Liang Hong, had grown up helping at the stall. She married Liew Choy, one of the cooks, and together they continued the family business.

Their children were Paul, Wayne and Jia Min.

They grew up inside it.

Childhood at the Restaurant

Helping at KEK was simply part of family life.

The siblings spent weekends working around the restaurant from a young age.

Paul served customers.

Wayne gravitated towards the kitchen.

Jia Min grew up understanding the machinery required to make everything function.

Yet their parents did not view this as training for succession.

Quite the opposite.

Paul told Vulcan Post that the older generation had experienced enough hardship to want something different for their children.

Education was supposed to offer an exit.

It is a familiar story among family-run food businesses. The first generation builds something because survival demands it; the next works hard so that their children will not have to.

And then sometimes the children come back voluntarily.

Paul Came Back for the Family

Paul's reason for returning is particularly revealing.

In the Vulcan Post interview, he explained that his decision was not simply about business opportunity.

Growing up with hawker parents had meant limited family time.

By entering the business with his siblings, Paul felt they were recovering some of what the family had missed when they were children.

The restaurant became a place where generations could work together.

That makes KEK different from the chef-centred businesses we often document at The Cuisine Journal.

At Burnt Ends, Dave Pynt's culinary philosophy is inseparable from one chef's relationship with fire.

At KEK, identity comes from a family.

One person cannot represent the whole thing.

Paul Learns to Become the Businessman

Even then, Paul did not immediately see himself as the boss.

He studied business through SIM and RMIT University and officially joined KEK after graduating in 2008.

Years later, he credited that education with changing how he viewed his role.

In a profile published by The Straits Times, Paul explained that his university experience helped him understand leadership, particularly the idea that managing a business did not require him to personally control everything.

His siblings had different strengths.

Use them.

Wayne understood the kitchen.

Jia Min understood operations.

Paul was comfortable with customers and business development.

The solution was not to make all three siblings identical.

It was to divide responsibility intelligently.

Paul later became Managing Director.

But the title does not entirely describe what diners see.

The Singapore Institute of Management's own profile of Paul notes that during busy service he still slips back into what he jokingly calls being the “order taker” — showing customers to tables, serving and working alongside the restaurant team.

For KEK, leadership remained unusually close to the dining room.

Wayne Chose the Wok

If Paul became the business mind, Wayne Liew became the culinary one.

Among the siblings, Wayne was the one naturally interested in cooking.

CNA's extensive profile of the Liew family records how he learned under his father in the kitchen and absorbed the underlying logic of zi char cooking.

That education was not primarily about luxurious ingredients.

It was about making things taste good with what was available.

His father's philosophy could be brutally simple: with soy sauce, sesame oil and Chinese wine, he could cook almost anything without customers complaining.

Behind the joke is an important feature of zi char.

It is an adaptable cuisine.

Unlike the highly codified craft found at a counter such as Sushi Sakuta, zi char cooks need to move rapidly across ingredients, sauces, textures and techniques.

Fish.

Pork.

Vegetables.

Noodles.

Crab.

Claypots.

Woks.

Deep fryers.

One table can order half the kitchen.

Wayne learned to make that flexibility part of KEK's identity.

Jia Min Makes the Restaurant Work

The third sibling, Jia Min Liew, took responsibility for operations.

That may be the least glamorous role to describe and one of the most important in practice.

A busy zi char restaurant requires more than cooking.

Tables need turning.

Orders need moving.

Staff need scheduling.

Ingredients need arriving.

Systems need functioning.

Customers need serving.

With Paul handling business development and front-of-house responsibilities and Wayne concentrating on food, Jia Min became the person responsible for keeping the operational structure together.

The Straits Times described the arrangement clearly: Wayne oversees the kitchen, Jia Min heads operations and Paul handles the front-of-house side of the business.

Three siblings.

Three jobs.

One restaurant.

Every Generation Leaves a Dish Behind

One of Paul's most useful explanations of KEK's food appears in the Vulcan Post interview.

The restaurant, he explained, has evolved with each generation.

The family protects dishes inherited from earlier generations while allowing later generations to leave their own contribution.

The first generation gave KEK its claypot pig liver.

The second brought dishes such as cuttlefish kang kong and moonlight hor fun.

The current generation became closely associated with coffee pork ribs.

That is a very different philosophy from freezing the restaurant at some supposedly perfect moment in its history.

Heritage, at KEK, is cumulative.

One generation does not erase another.

It adds another layer.

This resembles the way Claypot Daddy uses familiar Singaporean comfort-food language while allowing a contemporary personality to emerge around it.

But KEK has been doing that across three generations.

Claypot Liver and Memory

The claypot pig liver is particularly important because it reaches back to the restaurant's earliest identity.

The dish is cooked quickly in an extremely hot claypot with ingredients such as onion, ginger and shallot.

The result is earthy, aromatic and unapologetically old-school.

It is also not necessarily the obvious dish one would invent today when trying to build an internationally marketable Singapore restaurant.

That is precisely why it matters.

The family protects it because it belongs to KEK's history.

Heritage restaurants often face a strange contradiction.

The dishes that made them culturally important can eventually look less fashionable than newer creations.

KEK's response has not been to delete the old food.

It places new dishes beside it.

Zi Char as Singaporean Food

As the siblings travelled internationally, their understanding of their own cuisine began to change.

Paul told CNA that the family had once regarded zi char as something humble and almost too ordinary to be special.

Hor fun was simply hor fun.

Then KEK began travelling.

International diners responded to the food very differently.

What seemed ordinary to the Liew family looked intensely Singaporean somewhere else.

That realisation changed the way they understood their inheritance.

KEK may have originated within a Hainanese family, but decades of living and cooking in Singapore had produced something much broader.

Vulcan Post described the resulting menu as something of a “rojak” of cuisines — shaped by different dialect groups, multicultural Singapore and generations of adaptation.

That makes zi char almost uniquely suited to the Singapore story.

It absorbs.

It adjusts.

Then it puts everything around one table.

The broader cultural mixing is also what makes places such as Burma Social interesting from another perspective: cuisines rarely exist in complete isolation from the people and cultures surrounding them.

KEK's menu has had half a century to prove the point.

Michelin Notices the Zi Char Stall

International recognition eventually followed.

KEK appeared in Singapore's Michelin Guide beginning in 2016, with later coverage describing the restaurant as a Michelin Plate-recognised establishment through 2022.

That distinction matters.

KEK was Michelin-recognised, rather than Michelin-starred.

The achievement was still significant for a family zi char business that had begun as a hawker stall.

Michelin did not create KEK's reputation among Singaporeans.

It amplified it internationally.

Then Anthony Bourdain Arrived

Another important moment came in 2017.

KEK appeared in Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown.

For a restaurant rooted in everyday Singapore cooking, Bourdain's attention was particularly appropriate.

His programmes often treated street food, family restaurants and everyday cooking with the same curiosity usually reserved for celebrated chefs.

The KEK siblings suddenly had another international audience.

CNA later described the sequence neatly: Michelin in 2016, Bourdain in 2017.

Then Netflix.

KEK on Netflix

In 2019, Keng Eng Kee appeared in Netflix's Street Food: Asia.

The Singapore episode placed the restaurant within a larger story about the people behind the country's everyday food culture.

By then, KEK had moved far beyond the anonymity of a neighbourhood zi char stall.

Netflix introduced the family and its cooking to viewers around the world.

The restaurant's own Facebook presence subsequently became part of the way KEK documented its growth, media appearances and the family behind the business.

What began at Havelock Road was now appearing on screens far beyond Singapore.

But International Recognition Changed Something Else

The biggest effect of international attention may not have been fame.

It gave the siblings confidence in zi char.

The KEK team began travelling overseas to represent Singapore through tourism events and culinary collaborations.

CNA documented appearances and collaborations stretching from San Sebastian and Copenhagen to Busan, Manila and New York.

Imagine the shift in perspective.

The grandparents had started cooking because they needed to make a living.

Their grandchildren were now flying overseas because people wanted them to demonstrate the food.

Paul reflected on precisely that irony.

His grandmother could never have imagined that the stall she started for survival would eventually be taken around the world by her grandchildren.

That may be the most extraordinary part of the KEK story.

Not Netflix.

Not Michelin.

The distance between those two generations.

Keeping a Heritage Business Modern

Heritage alone does not guarantee survival.

Paul understood that fairly early.

One of his first major projects was introducing technology into an operation accustomed to doing things the traditional way.

It was not easy.

According to Vulcan Post, implementing tablet ordering took around four years because older employees were uncomfortable with the unfamiliar system.

Paul learned not to force the change.

Instead, newer and younger employees adopted the technology first.

As its advantages became visible, resistance among the older staff began to soften.

That method tells us something about how Paul approaches modernisation.

Change the system.

Do not unnecessarily humiliate the people who built the old one.

It is a useful principle for any heritage business.

Hospitality Still Matters More Than the Tablet

Technology did not replace the human part of KEK.

If anything, Paul became increasingly interested in hospitality.

The restaurant's style of service remained deliberately informal and personal.

Customers should feel as though they were being welcomed into someone's home.

That means conversation matters.

Regulars matter.

Recommendations matter.

Feedback matters.

The restaurant can take orders digitally while still behaving like a family-run zi char.

That balance between systems and personality is something larger operations often struggle to retain. Catering companies such as CaterCo and Lavish solve hospitality at scale through systems.

KEK's challenge is almost the reverse.

Build better systems without losing the feeling that somebody from the family might still take your order.

Then the Pandemic Arrived

Covid-19 tested that philosophy severely.

Restaurants lost dine-in customers almost overnight.

A business built around communal zi char — groups gathered around large tables sharing multiple dishes — was particularly exposed.

The siblings had to adapt quickly.

Online ordering became essential.

Delivery systems were strengthened.

Recipes were adjusted so dishes would travel better.

But one decision became particularly important to the family.

They would prioritise people over profit.

CNA reported that the Liew family retained staff during the crisis rather than aggressively cutting manpower to protect margins.

For Paul and his siblings, employees were not simply units of labour.

Many had been part of KEK for years.

A family business could hardly claim to value family while abandoning the people who had helped build it the moment circumstances became difficult.

Heritage Cannot Mean Refusing to Change

The pandemic reinforced something Paul already believed.

A heritage brand cannot survive by doing everything exactly as it did fifty years ago.

The flavours and values can remain.

The operating model may need to move.

Delivery became a meaningful part of the business after Covid.

Digital ordering remained.

Expansion resumed.

And in 2022, KEK opened a large air-conditioned restaurant at SAFRA Tampines.

Later expansion continued.

Yet the food remained recognisably KEK.

That distinction is important.

Some restaurants use expansion as an opportunity to reinvent themselves into something more polished.

KEK's evolution is closer to what we see at Korea Culture Terminal 3: the physical format can change significantly while the central proposition remains deliberately familiar.

Wayne Is Allowed to Experiment

Preserving family recipes does not mean Wayne is forbidden from playing.

Quite the opposite.

The third generation has experimented with combinations that earlier generations would probably never have imagined.

KEK has explored modern interpretations and spin-offs built around zi char flavours, including ideas such as salted-egg and chilli-crab-inspired dishes.

That instinct makes sense.

Wayne inherited a cuisine based partly upon improvisation.

Zi char itself is flexible.

A wok does not care whether an ingredient is fashionable.

It cares whether the cook understands heat.

This is where KEK's cooking philosophy shares something with restaurants such as Dirty Supper, where a chef's understanding of ingredients matters more than rigidly obeying a predetermined culinary category.

The difference is that Wayne experiments inside a family business with fifty years of customer expectations behind him.

Freedom exists.

But so does responsibility.

The Siblings Need One Another

KEK would be a very different business if any one of the siblings were operating alone.

Wayne can create food.

But somebody has to build the organisation around it.

Paul can expand the business.

But expansion means nothing if the kitchen loses what people came for.

Jia Min can keep operations moving.

But she needs a product people want and a business capable of bringing them through the door.

Paul's university education seems to have helped him recognise this.

He does not need to be the best person at every task.

He needs to know who is.

That is perhaps why the third-generation transition has worked.

The siblings did not inherit identical roles.

They inherited the same responsibility.

Family Before Business

Paul has repeatedly returned to the importance of family when explaining KEK.

That may sound sentimental until one considers the practical consequences.

The business exists because one generation worked so hard that the next generation wanted their children to escape it.

Those children returned anyway.

Not because they misunderstood the hardship.

They had watched it their entire childhood.

They returned because the restaurant also contained something they did not want to lose.

Their parents.

Their grandparents.

Their recipes.

Their customers.

And the strange institution that had gradually formed around all of them.

A Restaurant Built Across Three Generations

There are many ways to preserve culinary heritage.

A chef such as Shintaro Hozumi carries inherited craft through individual professional practice.

KEK preserves something more collective.

A recipe from Grandma.

A dish from Mum and Dad.

A new creation from Wayne.

A business system from Paul.

An operating structure from Jia Min.

Put them together and the result is not exactly the restaurant the grandparents started in 1970.

Nor should it be.

The world around it has changed.

The Wok Is Still Burning

Michelin recognition is impressive.

Netflix is impressive.

Anthony Bourdain visiting is impressive.

International collaborations are impressive.

But none of those things explains why Keng Eng Kee has survived for more than half a century.

The answer is less glamorous.

The family kept showing up.

One generation cooked.

The next took over.

The third returned even though they had been given every opportunity not to.

Paul learned how to build the business.

Wayne learned how to carry the food forward.

Jia Min learned how to keep the organisation functioning.

They introduced technology.

Opened new locations.

Built delivery systems.

Travelled the world.

And still kept their grandmother's claypot liver.

That may be the clearest expression of what the Liew siblings are trying to do with Keng Eng Kee Seafood.

They are not preserving the restaurant by preventing it from changing.

They are changing it carefully enough that it remains worth preserving.