Nineteen Years In A Room With 307 Monthly Closures
In the first ten months of 2025, Singapore shut 2,431 food and beverage businesses. The Ministry of Trade and Industry confirmed the figure in a written reply to Parliament. The number is the room we are still standing in.
In November 2025, the Ministry of Trade and Industry tabled the answer to a Parliamentary Question on F&B closures. The numbers are restrained on the page and brutal on the street. Between 1 January and 23 October 2025, Singapore lost 2,431 retail food establishments — an average of 307 closures every month, up from 254 a month in 2024. Of the businesses that shut while under five years old, eighty-two percent had never declared a profit. Sixty-three percent of all the closures had been open for under five years.
We read those numbers carefully, because we are on the other side of that distribution. The same operator group behind 8 Korean BBQ opened Sticky — the hand-pulled rock candy shop — in Singapore in 2007. Nineteen years ago. By the M.T.I. survival curve, we should not be here.
What 19 years actually buys
It is easy to read longevity as a vanity metric. It is not. In a kitchen, time is a tool. Time is how a charcoal supplier learns what cut of wood holds the heat we want. Time is how the meat trader stops sending us cuts that look right in a chiller and behave wrong on a grate. Time is the slow accumulation of small refusals — to the seed oil bottle, to the cheaper marbling grade, to the convenience cut — that compounds into what arrives at the table.
A restaurant under five years old is in a different situation. It is, by the M.T.I. data, statistically more likely than not to never have made a profit. That pressure goes somewhere. It goes into the marbling grade. It goes into the cooking oil decision. It goes into the staff turnover. None of those decisions are visible at the table. All of them are tasted.
Hands-on, after the room gets known
There is a quieter problem at the other end of the survival curve. The Singapore F&B operators who do last begin, around year five, to face the opposite temptation: step away from the floor. Hire a general manager. Let the brand run itself. Take the meeting from somewhere else. This is the hands-off transition. It is the move most successful local restaurants make. It is also the move that begins to soften the food.
We have not made it. Nineteen years in, the founders are still on the floor — at the candy slab at Sticky, at the bar at Joo Bar, at the grate here at 8 Korean BBQ. Still tasting cuts before they reach the menu. Still walking the charcoal back from the supplier in person. That is not the heroic version of small business. It is the version that keeps the marbling grade where it is. Hands-on is the only known counter to the slow drift that happens when an operator stops checking.
The two columns of a Singapore F&B floor
| What a five-year-old restaurant negotiates | What a nineteen-year-old operator negotiates |
|---|---|
| The first lease renewal | The fourth |
| An untested charcoal supplier | A supplier whose father we knew |
| The cut the broker has on hand | The cut we asked for last month |
| The cheapest oil that scales | No oil on the grill, by design |
| An exit plan | The next nineteen years |
The first column is the situation eighty-two percent of failed shops were in. The second is the situation we are in, on Eu Tong Sen Street, in 2026. They are different categories of business that share a postal code.
The lineage
The team is one team. Sticky opened in 2007 in a small unit, with a single rock candy slab and a pair of pulling hooks. The same group, the same family, opened Joo Bar in Bugis a few years later — a Korean bar built around makgeolli that nobody else in Singapore was importing at the time. 8 Korean BBQ followed: a charcoal grill, two outlets, one rulebook written in Singapore. Three brands. Zero foreign parent companies. No licence agreement that lives in Seoul. The marbling grade is decided here.
What this means at your table
If you sit down at 8 Korean BBQ tonight, the person on the floor checking your grate is more likely than not someone who has worked with the same operator group for years. The charcoal is the charcoal we have used for a decade. The cut of beef is the cut we asked for, not the cut that arrived. None of that fits on a menu. All of it fits on the grate.
The room you are sitting in lost 2,431 of its neighbours this year. Nineteen years is not a brag. It is the only credential the M.T.I. data treats as scarce. Book a table for two, four, or eight. If you ask who runs the place, the answer will be a name, not a holding company.
Source: Ministry of Trade and Industry, Written reply to PQ on retail food establishment openings and closures in 2025, November 2025; corroborating coverage at Mothership.SG.