Ex-banker turns to family's snake soup restaurant

HONG KONG: Ask any stand-up comedian today, and they’ll tell you there’s a lot in common between banking professionals and snake-oil salesmen. Both are creepy, they’ll point out, and the ease with which banks’ representatives sweet-talked and sold toxic sub-prime assets to each other and to gullible third parties would be the envy of any syrupy seller of reptilian secretions.

But Gigi Ng isn’t one of those. She’s the real deal: she’s a former banking professional who today runs Seh Wong Fan (‘Snake King Fan’), Hong Kong’s best-known snake soup restaurant. 

“To be honest, I was never interested in this line of work,” Gigi, 35, confessed to DNA, while slurping a bowlful of Five Snake Banquet, a signature dish at her restaurant. Having completed her MBA from the California State University, she had settled into a lucrative career at a multinational bank. But in 1999, familial ties tugged her into the restaurant business: her father, who was running the snake soup restaurant founded by his grandfather some 117 year ago, was diagnosed with liver cancer, and Gigi, as the youngest of six sisters, stepped in to help. 

After her father’s passing in 2004, the entire responsibility of managing the restaurant fell on her slender shoulders, and she gamely took it on. But trying to introduce her tradition-bound restaurant staff to modern management concepts proved rather more challenging. “I didn’t want them to give up the restaurant’s authenticity: that, after all, is our brand identity,” she says. But she did enhance her restaurant’s profile by getting her foot-dragging chefs to enter culinary contests organised by the Hong Kong Tourism Board, which they went on to win. 

In the Chinese belief system, snake soup has medicinal properties: it enhances blood circulation, and specific snake species are known to have specific curative powers. On any winter night, you can see a scattering of the city’s glitterati queuing up outside Gigi’s restaurant. “In peak season, we sell 400 bowls of snake soup at every mealtime,” she says. 

But since snake soup dishes are popular only in the winter months, the restaurant business tended to flag in the summer. As part of a business derisking strategy, Gigi introduced non-snake dishes into the menu, a move that’s paid off handsomely. Her restaurant has been featured on international food shows and in turn has brought flocks of overseas tourists to her doorstep, looking to savour a unique ‘Hong Kong experience’.

Having consolidated and built on her family legacy, Gigi is looking for newer business models for the future: she isn’t averse to a franchise model, which would let her retain and leverage her restaurant’s brand name, or even tie-ups with other larger food chains. “I’m open to possibilities,” she says. 

If she does sell the restaurant business, would she consider returning to a career in banking, seeing that banks are collapsing and jobs are unsafe? “No way,” says Gigi, recoiling in horror – as if she’s just seen a snake. When you’ve been crowned the Snake Queen, everything else pales in comparison.