Former engineer opens Hokkien mee stall with food cooked by a robot

With over 20 years of experience as an inventor, engineer Ang Chip Hong, 53, has gone from creating the world’s first Wi-Fi detector to operating his first AI-powered hawker stall, Wok AI. His quirky unit at Margaret Drive relies on a S$14,000 (US$10,400) frying robot to whip up plates of Hokkien mee, which he claims is “better than most average Hokkien mee stalls”. 
Ang opened Wok AI in early November this year, a year after quitting his job as a land IoT (internet of things) director, who oversees the research and development of IoT devices at the Singapore Management University (SMU).
Prior to this, he worked as a researcher in the government-supported tech company A*Star for over 20 years. There, he was the lead inventor in the teams that created four patented products: The “world’s first” Wi-Fi detector to help users in the early 2000s detect areas with Wi-Fi; the “world’s first” microwave leakage detector; a smart toy that could teach kids to recognise objects; and a smart card for inventory management.
Despite being so accomplished in the tech field, Ang says F&B has always been his true calling. “I feel I’ve contributed enough to science and technology already, so I want to do something in F&B, which is what I really like. This has always been my interest – even in my earlier days at A*Star, my boss knew this, so whenever we organised events, he always asked me to be in charge of food,” he laughs.
Ang shares that he has been cooking since he was six years old.
“I come from a poorer background, and I have four brothers. My mother was always busy taking care of us while working as a seamstress, so she had no time to cook. I’m very greedy and love to eat good food, but had no money to go out to buy it, so my interest in cooking started there,” he says. 
The hawker adds that he decided to focus on Hokkien mee (and char kway teow, which he says is up next on his menu) as it’s a dying trade.
“In the area of Hokkien mee and char kway teow, there’s always news of older hawkers passing on and the stalls being returned to the NEA – I feel that if this goes on, in five years time, there’ll be very few Hokkien mee and char kway teow stalls left in Singapore,” he explains.
His current Hokkien mee recipe is his own.
Though he had always wanted to enter the F&B industry, he tells us he pursued engineering because of his mum.
“My mum knew about my interest in food since I was young. When I was about to graduate from NUS engineering in 1996, she warned me that if I dared go into the food business after graduating, she would kill me! She wanted me to work as an engineer after she painstakingly raised me through my university years, and felt that I would lead an easier life as an engineer,” he explains.
Ang tells 8days.sg that his job as a researcher at A*Star earned him up to S$20,000 in royalties for inventing each patented product (he co-invented four), and he drew a five-figure monthly salary. 
Between 2004 and 2009, Ang left A*Star temporarily to open his own affiliated research firm, SmartID, which he co-owned with three others. He says the company was eventually “acquired at a valuation of S$3.5 million” in 2009, where the buyer bought 75 per cent of its shares for S$2.5 million.
For the past couple of years, Ang has already dipped his toes in the F&B scene. He invested in businesses like the Sin Kee Chicken Rice chain and Eureka Taste cafe, which he now co-owns.
“To be honest, running hawker stalls will never bring in as much money as I made in engineering. But the motivation to work in F&B is really not about money to me, it’s my interest. I don’t see it as a salary drop, ’cause even if I didn’t work as a hawker, I would also not be working a full-time job now. I’ve come to a stage where I feel like I’d [rather] make [less] money while doing something I like,” he explains. 
He adds: “Financially, I am okay. This hawker business is something that I’ve always wanted to do since I was young, I’m just happy seeing people enjoying the food I cook”. 
Ang invested S$50,000 to open his stall, and says he plans to open more outlets in the future. Currently, he has one full-time staff and one part-timer running the business, while he usually drops by in the morning to oversee things.
So far, he tells us that his staff have had no problems learning how to use the cooking machine.
“It’s too simple to use already! They just have to press one button, and everything will operate [on its own] from there,” he exclaims. 
Though it seems fitting for a former inventor to sell robot-made Hokkien mee, Ang tells us that he had initially planned to sell prawn mee the traditional way. 
He shares: “I tried to look around to hire people, but even after offering a salary as high as S$4,000 to S$5,000, nobody wanted to work as a Hokkien mee cook. This means that the demand is low, so I felt that I needed to rely on robots to assist.”
That’s when he got the idea to bring in a S$14,000 frying machine, created by a fellow engineer friend from Wuhan, China. According to Ang, this machine – which can cook up to thousands of dishes – is already a widely used contraption in China, mostly in buffet restaurants.
The way it works is simple: A stall employee follows instructions on its screen and loads ingredients such as eggs, prawns, stock, noodles, and pork belly into the machine. The robot will do the rest of the work – it has a chamber with a rotating arm that stir-fries the noodles. 
Despite being an engineer himself, Ang explains that he didn’t attempt to make his own frying machine as it would be too costly to produce in Singapore. He adds: “My friend from Wuhan spent five years perfecting these robots for cooking, so it would be a huge learning curve [for me]”. 
The only thing he had to refine in this machine was his Hokkien mee recipe, which he admits he is still perfecting. 
While many people are sceptical about the abilities of a robot to cook a dish as good as a human’s, Ang tells us there are benefits to employing the help of AI to whip up a meal. In particular, its consistency: “A Hokkien mee seller might start at [a standard of] 90 per cent, but towards the end of the day, they might drop to 60 per cent only, because human fatigue will always set in,” he explains.
A robot, of course, would be able to whip up a thousand plates of noodles, all tasting nearly identical.
However, Ang humbly admits that his Hokkien mee is still “not as good as the top Hokkien mee sellers”. He jokingly refers to his current ‘edition’ of prawn mee as his ‘4.0’ version (his fourth revision of his recipe) – and tells us he’s working on his fifth, and hopefully final, rendition. His most pressing feedback so far, he says, is that his prawn noodles lack wok hei. 
To fix this, the hawker says he now pre-fries the noodles to infuse some smoky flavour before putting them into the machine.
So far, the feedback has been good: “Many people have very low expectations of a robot’s cooking, so they come with the expectation that it’ll only hit the 50 per cent mark. But when they’ve eaten it, they tell me that it can honestly hit the 70 to 75 per cent mark,” he shares. 
Currently, Ang sells a plate of Hokkien mee for S$5.50 (regular) and S$7 (large). A ‘party pack’ (S$28) that feeds four to six people is also available. 
Wok AI is at 38A Margaret Drive, #01-34, Singapore 142038. Open daily 9am to 9pm. Tel: 9660 4222. 
This story was originally published in 8Days. 
For more 8Days stories, visit https://www.8days.sg/