How Daniel Tay, former owner of Bakerzin, revived his father’s Seng Choong Confectionery brand

Aspiring pastry chefs typically head west for their baptism of fire — cultivating exacting precision to confect puff pastry with hundreds of buttery layers, and mind-bendingly realistic trompe l’oeil desserts in the guise of everyday objects. After decades of honing his ability in French pastry arts, which he channelled into now defunct patisserie-cafe chain Bakerzin, Singaporean chef Daniel Tay is due East.

The 54-year-old, who sells traditional Chinese snacks such as ang ku kueh under his recently launched brand Madam Ang KK, will soon travel to Chaozhou, China, to fine-tune his soon kueh making skills. While some may regard the Teochew steamed dumplings filled with turnip and dried shrimps as provincial fare, Tay reveals that they’re fiendishly difficult to master. For one, perfecting the texture of the chewy rice and tapioca flour wrappers is a lesson in patience.

Although Tay may count the likes of Pierre Herme and Frederic Bau as his inspirations, he avers that such European pastry chefs are vaunted by the press, at times to the detriment of local culinary heritage. “It might not look glamorous, but those are our traditions, which will be forgotten if nobody talks about them,” said the F&B entrepreneur, who also owns cheesecake brand Cat & the Fiddle plus local heritage bakery Old Seng Choong.

Besides his main agenda, he has also got other side quests slated for his upcoming sojourn. Over coffee, he cheerfully mentions a pitstop at his ancestral village close to Fujian province, as well as plans to attend feng shui classes. He’d become a votary of the Chinese practice of geomancy after a particularly painful business failure early in his career.

“You don’t always have to hit a brick wall, there are many things you can do to avoid different circumstances. I’ve travelled so much in the past few years that I’ve managed to avoid conflict with my wife,” he quipped.

The son of a baker who owned the popular Seng Choong Confectionery at Marine Parade, Tay did not stoke ambitions to succeed the family business growing up — though he occasionally helped at the bakery. Instead, he hopscotched from one pursuit to the other, entertaining the notions of becoming a fashion designer and professional snooker player at different intervals. “All my siblings graduated from universities in the US, while I was this hopeless guy who didn’t study and slept till two in the afternoon,” he recounted, adding that his tendency at the time to space out led family members to suspect that he was using drugs.

His paternal grandfather, however, had always pegged him for a budding entrepreneur who would surpass his siblings. So, he was hustled overseas to study baking science and technology at U.S. Wheat Associates in Bangkok. He proved to be a quick study, and soon found his metier as a pastry chef. “I realised that I may not love this, but I need to be in F&B. Years later, I discovered through astrology that it’s my calling to be a businessman,” he proclaimed.

IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED…

While he may have been slow off the mark, he returned to Singapore on a quest to stake his claim in the industry, starting with reimagining his father’s old school bakery. “I wanted to transform Seng Choong Confectionery into something like Bread Talk — this was way before it existed,” he recalled. The unassuming heartland bakery got a facelift with startling cobalt blue flooring and display. For many longstanding customers, this was a dislocating contrast from the no-frills bakery that was established in 1965.

“We were ahead of our time,” he said. As a result, his first venture flamed out, and his father had to sell the shop. “That was 30 years of his hard work gone in that one year I took over, so it was very tough for me,” he reflected. Friends began to shun his father, thinking that he’d gone into rack and ruin, though the elder Tay never held it against him. The pair chalked the failure up to a business misstep and drew a line under the episode.

Then, in 1998, under the spectre of the Asian Financial Crisis, Tay took his opportunity to flip the script by launching Baker’s Inn (later renamed Bakerzin). This time, he found a sweet spot, with the bakery chain amassing an appreciative following for its premium yet accessible desserts. “There wasn’t really anyone doing it at the time. Starbucks’ coffee and cakes were horrible, and decent cakes could only be found in hotels, which were expensive,” said Tay, who claims partial credit for inspiring Singapore’s next wave of modern bistros.

Bakerzin steadily became a household name, but like many F&B operators, grappled with rising costs including rental over time. Tay sold the business in 2007 to “a very rich Indonesian group” whose identity he wouldn’t disclose, but continued managing it till 2013.

“The guy who bought it did not even meet me once, and all the information gets lost when you communicate via a go-between,” groused Tay. The subject apparently hits a raw nerve. “When you get some financial guy to oversee the business, he thinks it’s easy to make money and starts cutting costs. I decided that I still prefer to work for myself.”

The founder ventured that he’d offered to buy back the business when he’d heard that it was going into liquidation in 2020, but his overture was rejected. “They didn’t want to sell to me, it would have been too much of an embarrassment.”

Bravado aside, Tay isn’t one to flog a dead horse. In 2013, he’d launched food manufacturing company Foodgnostic Pte Ltd, which has five factories — in Singapore, Malaysia and China. They double up as production facilities for Cat & the Fiddle and Old Seng Choong, which were incepted in 2014 and 2016 respectively. The former brand has a franchise in Indonesia, and supplies cafes and restaurants in China.

Tay says he’s achieved consistency by investing heavily in quality control. “Our factories in China are super clean and precise, down to workers sorting defective walnuts and raisins. There’s no chance of failure,” he crowed. It’s evident that these gleaming white facilities are his pride and joy, as he shows off videos depicting boxes of cakes streaking by on conveyer belts.

For all his brashness, Tay betrays a rare moment of vulnerability when talking about Old Seng Choong, an ode to his father and a chance to preserve his legacy. He recalls being featured alongside his parents in an article about his rebranding of his father’s business, with his ailing dad in a wheelchair. “In tears, my dad told me how his friend called him saying, ‘Wow, you’re back’. He passed on four months later,” he recounted. “At least I did something right.”

HOW TO AVERT A CRISIS

The COVID-19 pandemic hobbled F&B players, with Singapore Department of Statistics reporting a 26 per cent year-on-year decline in sales in 2020. Tay, on the other hand, noted a bonanza. After implementing initial pay cuts at the start of the pandemic, he shored up the business by pivoting — he churned butter out of surfeit cream from other proprietors, and flogged products such as mushroom soup packs on Facebook Live.

A session co-hosted by local food blogger Maureen Ow, who goes by the moniker of Miss Tam Chiak, drew brickbats from netizens who claimed they were flouting safe distancing restrictions. So, he hammed it up for audiences solo, and claims to have raked in five-figure sales nonetheless. Notably, he managed to maintain Old Seng Choong’s tenancy at Marina Bay Sands, in part by fulfilling corporate orders.

“The worst thing to do in a crisis is stay still and wait to die. At the bottom of the valley, you just have to keep walking, and you’ll find your footing and way out eventually,” he mused.

It’s easy to fathom why the father of three young adults didn’t have much time for his kids in their formative years, given the vicissitudes he’s faced. Beyond work, he’s a shutterbug — having trained his staff to do all their photography inhouse — and tea connoisseur. His most expensive tea purchase is a Pu Er from Banzhang, Yunnan, priced at approximately S$10,000 (US$7,354) per cake.

For now, Tay is licking his lips on plans to evolve his businesses — the first Cat & the Fiddle outlet equipped with an in-store oven is in the pipeline for the first quarter of 2025.

So what’s the secret to longevity in Singapore’s saturated F&B landscape?

“Keep evolving. The life of an F&B entrepreneur is very tough with rising costs, so we have to find ways to work differently,” he concluded.