Allan and Vivian Tan Didn’t Want the Soup Shop

Vivian Tan had told herself she would study hard enough to stay out of the family soup shop. As a child she helped at the stall and watched her parents get up around 2 a.m. to start the broths, with one day off a year at Chinese New Year. She later trained as a mechanical engineer and took a job as a regional sales engineer. Allan, fifteen years younger, grew up sweeping floors at the Geylang room and knocking into customers for pocket money. Neither sibling planned to run Tan Ser Seng.

CNA Lifestyle’s May Seah sat with them in October for the brand’s 80th year. “There are bonds that cannot be broken,” Vivian told her. By then the third generation was already in charge, and Allan had opened the family’s first expansion beyond Geylang, at Great World.

The shop began with their grandfather. Tan Ah Sai left Chaoshan as a child, arrived in Singapore in 1927, and in 1946 started selling turtle soup with Chinese herbs from two pots on a bamboo pole, walking to Lorong Tai Seng for labourers who wanted a hot bowl. Tan Khar Seng, their father, told CNA a bowl cost 20 or 30 cents then. After Ah Sai died in 1973, Khar Seng took over in his early twenties and eventually settled the restaurant at 29 Lorong Bachok in 1992.

He kept his father’s recipe and changed the floor around it. In 1986 he began serving the soup in individual claypots. He poured Teochew yam rice beside the bowl instead of the fried vermicelli other turtle shops used. Ginseng black chicken and cordyceps chicken went on the board so guests who skipped turtle still had a pot. Around 2000, at what the family remembers as a peak, his knees gave out. He called an older sister and asked if her son wanted the business. Vivian’s mother overheard and phoned Vivian in tears. Vivian was about twenty-four or twenty-five; Allan was about ten. She quit the engineering path and came back. There were no written recipes. She and her husband, Derrick Lee, learned by watching Khar Seng cook and writing the steps down.

Allan joined more than a decade later, after school, when he saw that his sister and brother-in-law needed help. Stomp later found him in the upstairs office that used to be his bedroom. A typical day, he said, still starts around 3 a.m. Broths simmer about twelve hours and double-boil for about two more. He put the house on delivery apps and Google reviews, tightened kitchen processes, and quarrelled with his father over how far a dish could change.

Khar Seng’s answer was often “Just use your heart.” Vivian and Allan are both engineers. They wanted steps one through ten. Allan told CNA he understands the line now. Vivian jokes that their father cooks as if he holds a Michelin star and checks every piece of meat. Allan, Vivian, and Derrick are the ones who know the recipes the family used to keep only in memory.

Great World is the chapter Allan wanted under his own name. The mall room has bright light, ceramic crockery, and electronic menus, far from the old-school Geylang floor. The overnight pots have not moved. Younger diners have. Allan told Stomp that older guests care about honest food and shrug at ambience. Younger ones want the flavour and the service, and a bowl that looks right on a phone. He tells first-timers to taste the broth before the meat. CNA and Allan both note that the kitchen uses farmed freshwater softshell turtles, not wild sea turtles, because that mix-up still turns people away.

New plates from their mother’s home cooking give newcomers another way in. Teochew steamed fish with black olive and preserved mustard greens sits beside sweet-and-sour pork made with persimmon, a nod to their grandfather’s name. Vivian has taken a TCM course. Later dishes may borrow from that study. Allan told CNA he did not want to take over only to mind the shop. He wanted a story that could continue, maybe into another generation.

Vivian asked CNA to put one line on the record for their father: that she is grateful for his guidance. “What’s there to thank me for?” he said. “We’re all one family. Let’s just do it well.”

The herbs still go on before dawn. At Great World, a younger diner can take a first spoonful without waiting for an elder to order the bowl. The opening week, the broths, and the prices are in the news story.