Co-founders and F&B industry veterans Veronica Tan and Angela Ho speak with the Institute of Service Excellence at Singapore Management University on what it takes to strive toward consistent growth, a drive for innovation and a commitment to service excellence.
Tell us about the significance of the restaurant’s name.
In Chinese culture, the peach is an important symbol of longevity, or one’s wish for a long and healthy life. The garden on the other hand is synonymous with growth, beauty and abundance. And if you look at the peach, you’ll notice that there’s only one seed within the fruit, and it’s a solid seed, symbolising the unity that we aspire to for all employees to work together in harmony, like one big family. Peach Garden in totality represents our ambition for growth, abundance and harmony.
The F&B industry is a very challenging environment particularly in terms of attracting and retaining talent. How does Peach Garden navigate these challenges and stay ahead of the competition?
We operate from a philosophy of inclusive growth and we take people development very seriously. In the F&B sector, concepts and tastes evolve so quickly that you will have to continuously upgrade your knowledge to keep pace and stay relevant. Every year, we’d plan trips overseas to learn about what’s new in the culinary space and how we can better innovate our dishes. We make sure to bring our employees along for these trips. We also pay close attention to what our customers tell us. In fact, some of the famous dishes we have are a product of revisions that are based on customer feedback.
How do you handle requirements for unique customer needs and customisation?
At Peach Garden, we serve a wide range of customers including celebrities, socialites, senior government officials and foreign dignitaries. Sometimes, we get requests for special food preparations that should exclude a long list of ingredients. We make sure to adhere to this list even if it deviates from our recipe because someone’s life could be at stake, say in the case of food allergies. It’s important to remember that fulfilling our customers’ needs and satisfaction is more important than the need to exert our authority in the kitchen when it comes to the integrity of a dish. However, always remember to first have your chefs agree to the requests before you say yes to your customers! Otherwise you’ll have to deliver the meal yourself.
For some high profile customers, we may have to take service out of our restaurants and into their private environments. We do catering for private events and parties as well. Being in an unfamiliar environment would mean adjustments to certain protocols. The ability to exercise discretion and have the flexibility to deviate from set processes is key.
Veronica and Angela, you started your career in the F&B industry as waitresses. How did you get to where you are today?
Angela and myself are Hainanese and die-hard foodies. We met and forged a steady friendship when working at Holiday Inn’s Sichuan restaurant Meisan in 1981. We worked together and were members of the pioneering team at restaurants such as Goodwood Park Hotel’s Min Jiang and Liu Xiang Lou at the former Taipan Hotel. Our synergy as a team prompted Orchard Hotel to ask us helped helm the pioneering team of the acclaimed Cantonese restaurant Hua Ting.
We decided to open our first restaurant at Novena Gardens in December 2002. The initial year was extremely difficult with the SARS outbreak in Singapore four months after we opened. Not fearful of hard work, we get out of our comfort zone to learn everything else besides taking care of guests. We withstood the challenges and astutely steered the restaurant back from the brink of collapse. It is because of the support of our loyal customers who appreciates our food and personalised service and the trust of investor that we are able to sustain our business.
Peach Garden became part of the Select Group in 2009. Since its inception fifteen years ago, the restaurant chain has now a total of 9 outlets and a leading private event catering service.
The government has launched various incentive schemes aimed at technology adoption, productivity and innovation in recent years. Has Peach Garden benefited from these schemes?
Faced with labour crunch and productivity challenges, we tapped on government's schemes such as Productivity and Innovation Credit (PIC) to introduce an integrated system linking the ordering system with kitchen processing system at our Peach Garden Chinese Dining restaurants. Orders are now taken using iPad mini that relay the information to the kitchen electronically for our chefs to prepare the food. Our service staff no longer need to memorise the orders or rush to the kitchen to relay the orders before they forget, and no orders will be missed out. With processes streamlined, staff can then attend promptly to waiting customers, have more time to interact with them, find out their needs and give menu suggestions. By eliminating basic tasks, our restaurants are able to step up efforts to better our customer service and deliver a more superior dining experience.
In the area of food preparation, we brought in a soyabean grinder machine from Japan to produce in house tofu and almond paste with fine texture. This machine has considerably improved consistency of our food, speed up the preparation process and reduced manual labour.
Peach Garden is part of Select Group, thus this allows us to leverage on Select's innovation initiative of automated central kitchen to better manage our food preparation operations for large scale catering events. Their automated equipment such as noodle boiler, deep fryer, slicer, food mixer and wok enable our kitchen team to prepare large volume of dishes in minutes, about half the usual time prepared manually thereby significantly improved our efficiency and productivity.