My name is Bjorn Chen and I am the chef and owner here at Artichoke. So we serve very inauthentic Middle Eastern food here. It's Middle Eastern inspired but it's nothing that you'll find in the Middle East. I'm not Middle Eastern myself but I love the cuisine and I respect the culture and I want to put my own spin on it. I fell in love with Middle Eastern food when I was living and working in Australia. My housemate was Persian, my best friend in university was Arab Canadian. My colleagues in the restaurants that I worked at were Turkish and Lebanese and Moroccan. I liked the fact that I started off not knowing much about it. To finally opening my eyes to what my housemate was barbecuing every Sunday, to what the mother of my Arab friend was cooking in the kitchen. It just changed what I felt about Middle Eastern cuisine. There was so much more to it that I didn't see. I was living a very safe, comfortable life in Australia. I lived in a big house, had a nice car. Australia is comfortable because there's a sudden minimum wage. And then I just thought, why am I using it to my comfort zone so early? I was working in restaurants and all that but maximum work week is like 45 hours a week. I just felt like I needed to shake my life up again. What better way to shake your life up than to do something so stupid as come into one of the most saturated restaurant markets in the world like Singapore and open another restaurant. I just needed to throw myself in the fire again and I did. You know, Hamas is one of those very fundamental things in any Middle Eastern restaurant. So we have our own version here. Our Hamas here uses me so to give saltiness and to give that umami mouth feel. So we make a good base Hamas with the usual ingredients, chickpeas, garlic, lemon juice, olive oil, tahini. But then we add Japanese white miso into it instead of salt. We take a blowtorch to the top of the Hamas just to get the char to release that aroma again. So it's a brand miso with walnuts and black currants. When I came back to Singapore I thought, okay, what kind of restaurant should I open? And I think it was quite an easy decision as to what cuisine to get into. No one else was messing with Middle Eastern food back in 2010. I don't know many people still today messing with Middle Eastern food. So why not just offer something totally radically different? So I opened this place on a family loan, cobbled together with whatever savings I had. So I can easily tell you that I only sunk $120,000 into Artichoke which is a laughable amount. No one would believe me when I said I only spent $120,000 here because most of the time when people open restaurants they start with $350,000, half a million. I literally went to relatives houses and asked them, hey, do you need a chair? Do you need a table? I went around, I begged Boroute, not in steel, but I begged Boroute. Went to Salvation Army to buy chairs and plates. Everything was second-hand. That's the only way that we could get started on the budget that I had. Biggest, most massive challenge that I had when we opened Artichoke in 2010 was that no one knew who the hell we were. You know these days when restaurants open there's a lot more social media hype. So it's easy for a new restaurant to get discovered. Back in 2010 there wasn't all this social media available. Took a long time for people to get the word. We literally had to stand out on the street and hustle people in. And then the next thing when they came in was like, oh, you're a Middle Eastern restaurant. What are you surf? And then the people that did know about Middle Eastern cuisine started asking, oh, okay, how come you got no donor kebab? So you got no falafel. And we didn't want to have those things because we were pursuing this unique, modern Middle Eastern angle. We did not fit into any box. And that's when people did not know what the classifier was. It was a long road to building our brand. I knew the statistics. Very few restaurants survive. Two out of 10 get past their second year. The other eight just lose money and close. Which is exactly why I chose to do something different. Because hey, if the odds are stacked against you anyway, you might as well just take the chance to be as different as you can, right? Even if you went with a safe idea that doesn't immunize you from what the odds are. There were a lot of people advising me, telling me different things. So it's a bit confusing. And as much as I appreciated their feedback, I just said, look, I got to do this. Believe in myself and just sometimes trust in your own instinct. The first few months after we opened were very rough. Because I hadn't lived in Singapore for seven and a half years before that. So finding stuff was difficult because all the chefs I knew were in Australia, not in Singapore. Putting a team together was quite challenging. It was almost crippling. There was a time I remember the only people staffing the whole front of house was my manager, his 15-year-old son, myself, even though I was the chef and my 15-year-old brother. On a night where there were 80 people, four of us running around like headless chickens, just dealing with it and trying to survive. So many times we thought of closing. But I think maybe about four or five months in, word got around. We got our first review. It was an above average review and brought in a lot more people there after. I would say that by the end of our second year, we were constantly booked out two weeks at advance and still today. So many changes very, very often. But the one thing that has not come off the menu in years has been our green harissa hot-skilled prawns. We lose money on this dish, okay? We sell it for $38 when we should be selling it for at least $50. But I know we can't go to $50. So we definitely lose money on this dish. Because the prawns by themselves are so expensive. So we serve four prawns in a skillet and we take a harissa which we make ourselves. But we use green chilies instead of red chilies. We cook it in a pan with good cream in. We let the cream split. It just unemalsifies the oil start coming out. The solid start will separate. We get the nice oily look on the top of the dish. So it's like eating good rendang or good curry. There's always a layer of oil on the top and the oil is good. It's one of those dishes that you just want to keep dunking more and more bread into the sauce. We finish it with fried onions and lots of coriander and lemon. At a chok just celebrated. It's eight year anniversary. I can't believe we've lasted this long. If you ask a lot of people who've had businesses that run for a long time, did you ever expect to be in business for so long? They'll tell you no. They didn't even think about it. They just put in their money. They put in their effort and they just hope for the best. Sometimes that's the only way to get there. Take that blind leap of faith. Be willing to lose it all. And that's what makes you exciting. If you really did set on opening a restaurant in Singapore, understand what profitability is like. Because it's not as profitable as you think. A lot of people that ask, what do you think restaurants make in terms of net profit? They say, or 20%, 30%, like no dude. Restaurants make minus 8%. That's on average. If every restaurant in Singapore averaged out in terms of performance, everyone would lose money. The reality is that some people make money more people lose money. Like I said, two restaurants survive out of ten. The two restaurants that do survive, like the cream of the crop, like really, really, really good restaurants, make about 5% to 10%. That's like very good numbers. The averagely successful one that's just getting by, which is still considered very lucky, is making maybe 2, 3, 4%. So what it means is that for a $10 plate of food, we're making less than $1. Less than $1. And if you think about it, that way, maybe financially speaking, this is not the best industry to get into. But if there's other reasons that are driving you to open a restaurant, know that it's going to be a long road to breaking even, know that it's going to be a lot of hard work, and know that you're not in it to get rich. I burn out on average two, three times a year, where you just can't think you're not yourself, stop eating, don't talk to anyone. You go get another angry tattoo. It's something like that, you know? I would advise anyone in the industry who's going through it to spend some time taking care of yourself, because that's the only way to be sustainable. So I take about two to three solo trips every year, so I just go somewhere and I just chill out, and I don't talk to anyone. I sit by a river, or I sit on a cliff, and I just think about life, and I listen to like Zotiello, know something about it. I don't know, I just start listening to like, soppy love songs. After having been in business for eight years, I've made a lot of money, but I've lost even more money. I've lost $1 million so far. $1 million, no kidding. We're lucky that we've paid off all our loans, all our debt every day that we have to breathe is a bonus. And I'm just going to continue riding this high for as long as it lasts. I take every day as it comes.