Meet Me at the Bar - Cooking with Dignity

Koh Seng Choon is the founder of Dignity Kitchen, a social enterprise providing culinary training for people with disabilities in Singapore and in Hong Kong

- Tara Sobti

What were you doing before launching Dignity Kitchen?

I started my career as a shipyard worker in Singapore. I went to the UK to study and lived there for 12 years. I obtained a degree in engineering and an MSc in computer-integrated manufacturing.

Then I came back to Singapore in 1994 and worked for [what is now] PricewaterhouseCoopers. Later, I started my own management consultancy to develop businesses in China and India. I ran this business until 2006.

What inspired you to launch Dignity Kitchen in Singapore in 2010?

In Singapore, you don't see beggars, homeless people or disabled people on the streets or in shopping malls. I realised there is another side of Singapore that people don't want to know about. I started something called Dignity Day. I spent one day a month doing something good. I started by hiring a bus and taking the homeless and elderly out for a day of shopping. My parents always said to me: "Nought to 25 years is for learning, 25 to 50 years is for earning and after 50 years is for giving back."

In 2006, I built a hawker training centre for those that are disabled or disadvantaged. In two years, I developed a curriculum to train street food operators. The curriculum covers how to operate, manage and cook food in a hawker stall. The Singapore government approved the concept right away because nobody had ever done it before. People open culinary schools all the time, but no one did this for hawkers. Dignity Kitchen is like a Hong Kong-cooked food centre but all the stalls are manned by differently-abled people. It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor: you just come to enjoy the food.

What is Dignity Kitchen's mission?