92-Year-Old Nam Seng Wanton Noodle Hawker Reopens Stall In New Location After Hiatus

Other than its wanton mee, Nam Seng’s other famous fixture is its founder Leong Yuet Meng. The feisty 92-year-old hawker started her stall in 1958, after taking an interest in the trade while visiting her cousin’s wanton mee stall in Chinatown.

While she has stopped cooking in her old age, she is still very active in running her business. A team of helpers do the cooking at the stall, while Yuet Meng deftly wraps wantons and takes orders from customers (regulars would remember her urging to “help yourself to the chilli” when collecting their food). She also buys ingredients for her stall at the wet market near her Toa Payoh flat every morning.

It’s perhaps an apt time for Yuet Meng to restart her decades-old biz, now that Covid-19 measures are easing up. The Cantonese-speaking nonagenarian told CNA in 2020 that one of the reasons for closing her CBD stall was also because “business dropped drastically overnight [due to everyone working from home]. It was very hard to get back to where we were before”.

It was a decision that Yuet Meng had made very reluctantly, as she had mused: “Ideally, I’d like to continue… I hope to preserve my brand — I built it up with a lot of hardship.”

The new Nam Seng has a similar layout as its Far East Square predecessor. But what's different is - according to a Che Kitchen rep - that the stall is franchised, though "Ah Por will be there this morning".

In a 2019 interview with The Straits Times, Yuet Meng and her three sons expressed their intention to franchise their business. Her youngest son Allan Tang, 65, had told the national broadsheet that they had no fixed plans for a franchisee yet, "but it's time for [my mother] to take it easy. It's okay for her to continue to work, but not for so long. With a franchise, she can supervise or come to the shop on a part-time basis. Her presence will also lend credibility to the shop's branding. It's impossible to ask her to stop".

The menu's prices are unchanged, but it appears to have been whittled down to just Nam Seng’s most famous dish, Singapore-style Wanton Noodle ($5 for Dry/Soup) with lean char siew. Back in the CBD, the stall had also offered dishes like soya sauce chicken noodles, fried rice and venison hor fun.

Nam Seng Wanton Noodle’s new location at Che Kitchen doesn’t sound so random if you consider that it’s near Yuet Meng’s home in Toa Payoh. The over 600-seat coffeeshop with an outdoor beer garden is opened by a fellow Cantonese speaker, Hong Kong-born chef Che Wan (pictured here with Ah Por). He also serves HK-style zi char and pastries like egg tarts at his kopitiam.

Nam Seng Wanton Noodle is at 1008A Toa Payoh North, S318998. Open daily 8am-6pm.

Photos: Nam Seng Wanton Noodle/ Che Kitchen