Eighteen Chefs was established in 2007 by Chef Benny Se Teo. It is different from other ordinary restaurants around as it has a meaningful social mission within it. This social mission is none other than to spread the story of experience of Chef Benny, give strength and hope to inspire troubled youths and people with conviction backgrounds to find alternative positive ways to reintegrate back into society. Eighteen Chefs also aims to create awareness and to provide a platform for these group of people to realise their talents in the Food & Beverage industry. By providing them with a safe and non-judgmental working environment, Eighteen Chef believes that they are giving them a chance to also work on their recovery through this unity of bond, which will eventually allow them to find a better and happier path in life.
Although the restaurant specialises in cheese baked rice and pasta, it also offers 300,000 variety of food for customers to select through the mix and matching concept. All the food offered are merely slightly more expensive that those found at food courts which makes them very affordable. There is even student set meals which can cost as low as $6.90 and which includes the main course, drink and ice cream.
After dining at the restaurant, patrons can even legally vandalize on the glass panels on the shop where they can write just about anything they like. It is the only the restaurant in Singapore that allows patrons to legally vandalize the shop. Eighteen chefs has definitely made a name for itself over the years
Having described all about the restaurant itself, it is probably time to look at its founder Chef Benny Se Teo and his inspiring story. Benny has spent many of his prime years behind bars between the years 1983 and 1993. He went in and out of prison for a total of four times for Heroin addiction. How this addiction came about you may ask? When Benny was only 14 years old, his own father was a opium addict and he lived in one of the hotspot for drug trafficking, Redhill. He started using marijuana awhile later and subsequently progressed to Heroin.
After his first prison sentence and release in 1983, he could not hold back his craving for Heroin and submitted to it and that landed him in and out prison for the next few years. After his fourth prison sentence, he started to realise that he should not be wasting his live away, and that was when he accepted Jesus into his heart. When he finally left the prison, he worked during the day and went back to a halfway house in the night as he feared he might yet again succumb to Heroin addiction.
Through his strong faith, Benny eventually managed to break free from the curse of Heroin addiction. However, due to his drug record, nobody was willing to employ him. He consequently went to work as a kitchen helper in Jamie Oliver's restaurant 'Fifteen' that hired problem teenagers and trained them to be useful people. From there he gained his inspiration, management skills and skills in western cooking and decided to set up his very own restaurant in Singapore, Eighteen Chefs.
However, Benny did not start out hiring ex-convicts as he did not want people to patronise his shop out of sympathy for the beneficiaries. This way, the business could be more sustainable as well. If the business was treated as charity work, people would only patronise it possibly once or twice and that would essentially defeat the whole purpose of setting up the business. When Eighteen Chefs gained more stability, he then started to fulfill his intended social mission of hiring ex-convicts and giving them a second chance in life.
I personally feel that Chef Benny as well as Eighteen Chefs has come a long way, from setting up all the way to how well-known they are now. I am sure that most people have at least heard about Eighteen Chefs before and one thing that he has done very well is in defining his social mission. Many other social enterprises out there are not recognised for their social mission at all and people just know them as an ordinary store. Eighteen Chefs and Chef Benny has helped to boost the social entrepreneurship industry by a substantial amount. Last but not least, a critical success factor for Eighteen Chefs is that Chef Benny learned how to sustain the business first before launching it as a full fledged social enterprise. In relation to my previous article, sustainability is one of the key factors for a social enterprise to do well.
I hope that you have been inspired by this story of Chef Benny and how Eighteen Chefs came about.
References:
Ong, J. H. (2009, Feburary 18). Mr benny se teo moh wah . Retrieved from http://www.soe.org.sg/files/interview2009.php?i=328
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