Manna Concepts chief commercial officer Belicia Tan (right) with husband-and-wife executive chefs, Bettina Tan and Alson Tan, at The Foundry Table’s speakeasy (Photo: Samuel Isaac Chua/EdgeProp Singapore)
When Linda Quek lost her job in the early 2000s, she returned to what she knew best: cooking. Launching Manna Pot Catering out of her home kitchen in 2002, she built a steady, loyal customer base through serving thoughtfully prepared, nourishing food.
More than two decades later, that boutique start-up has grown into Manna Concepts, a multi-brand hospitality group spanning eight brands and two central kitchens.
The group’s newest venture, The Foundry Table, is a Mediterranean-European restaurant and speakeasy which opened this January at Oakwood Bencoolen hotel on 30 Bencoolen Street.
The Foundry Table reflects how the family, now in its second generation of leadership, is rethinking the F&B model in an industry where margins are thin and rental costs are rising.
Belicia Tan, Quek’s daughter and chief commercial officer of Manna Concepts, outlines the group’s strategic shift towards optimising commercial space and remaining agile in a fluctuating market. “The idea is to adopt a mixed revenue model,” she says.
By anchoring part of the business with more predictable income streams, such as hotel breakfast services or long-term partnerships, the group can then activate the space during other periods with more curated F&B concepts or event-driven use cases, she says in an interview with EdgeProp Singapore.
The Foundry Table is the most recent application of this strategy. Under an agreement with the Oakwood Bencoolen hotel, the restaurant serves breakfast to hotel guests, which creates a reliable revenue stream that helps offset the volatility of traditional dining.
Outside those morning hours, it opens to the public for lunch and dinner. The space is also available for private dining, corporate events, and themed experiences ranging from kids’ parties to brand activations.
The main dining area comfortably seats around 70 guests; a hidden speakeasy tucked behind a velvet curtain holds up to 40 more.
The main dining area at The Foundry Table also serves breakfast to hotel guests, which helps create a reliable revenue stream (Photo: Manna Concepts)
Manna Concepts maintains a core leadership team rooted in family ties. Belicia joined in 2015 with a vision to grow it into a multi-brand hospitality group.
She established Divine Artisan, the group’s halal-certified artisan bakery, in 2016, followed by the floristry and event styling arm, Flora Artisan, in 2017.
When the pandemic disrupted the wedding industry in 2020, she launched Manna Weddings to help couples navigate evolving regulations and modified event formats.
The restaurant division is helmed by her sister Bettina Tan and Alson Tan, Bettina’s husband — both executive chefs trained at the Culinary Institute of America, Singapore.
The couple cut short their externships in San Francisco in 2020, returning to Singapore to help steady the group during the height of the pandemic.
“We were thrown into the restaurant business game at the highest difficulty level,” Alson says. He recalls the need for constant adaptation as the team managed compliance with public health protocols alongside industry headwinds such as supply-chain disruptions and a surge in raw material costs.
Faced with these complexities, Bettina and Alson focused on research and development, overhauling the menu at The White Tiffin, the group’s homegrown Peranakan-inspired restaurant brand. The new dinner menu they developed now serves five outlets of The White Tiffin in Singapore.
Belicia credits the couple as the hands and heart of the operation.
The Foundry Table occupies the first floor of Oakwood Bencoolen, a hotel with a storied timeline.
Originally built in 1987 as Bayview Hotel Singapore, it underwent a $20 million renovation in 2017, reopened as 30 Bencoolen the following year, and was rebranded by Ascott as Oakwood Bencoolen in December 2025.
F&B operations in the space had been dormant since the pandemic, with the hotel outsourcing food catering for its guests in the interim.
When Manna Concepts took over the space in December 2025, the restaurant was equipped with a bar and kitchen, along with a storeroom a few steps down from the main floor.
That storeroom became the seed of an idea. “When I saw the empty and underutilised storeroom, tucked away in the corner, I knew that I wanted to transform it into a hidden speakeasy with European influences,” says Belicia.
Having spent three years in the UK for her undergraduate studies, Belicia had grown accustomed to bars and speakeasies that were intimate, unhurried, and steeped in the quiet sophistication of another era — a combination she felt was largely absent from Singapore.
Working closely with Brennan Phua of local interior design firm SGInterior, Belicia created a moodboard while Phua produced a 3D rendering. SGInterior is a long-time partner of the group, having worked on other Manna Concepts outlets including The Blue Tiffin at Village Hotel Changi and several White Tiffin outlets.
The team then made a three-day trip to a factory in Foshan, China, to inspect materials firsthand, select finishes, and commission bespoke pieces and furniture.
“We wanted to curate everything, from the dimensions to the texture and quality,” she says.
The finished space has walls in a deep, moody green — a shade that pulls the room inwards and is echoed in the velvet armchairs. Crimson banquette seating hugs the perimeter in tufted panels, while circular tables with black marble-tops sit on brass bases. Vintage posters in gold frames evoke a bygone era of jazz clubs and late-night supper rooms.
At the centre of the room, a long stone-top counter — original to the space — doubles as a functional surface for mezze spreads and event beverage stations.
The speakeasy is accessed through a discreet velvet curtain and is designed for those who value “hushed conversations and the luxury of being unseen”, as the group puts it.
Behind a velvet curtain, the speakeasy is inspired by the sophistication of old-world dining rooms and can host up to 40 guests (Photo: Manna Concepts)
The main restaurant is warmer in register: light wood floors, leather dining chairs in a cognac tone and timber-slatted ceilings.
The Foundry Table’s total footprint spans more than 4,000 sq ft, including the speakeasy and kitchen. By leveraging existing infrastructure, renovation costs were kept to a minimum.
“Our focus was primarily on designing and furnishing the speakeasy and the experiential elements of the space, so we spent about $30,000 on renovation and furnishings,” says Belicia. The fit-out was completed in roughly a month.
Accessibility was also a priority. The Foundry Table sits across the road from Bencoolen MRT Station on the Downtown Line, while Bras Basah MRT Station on the Circle Line is just around the corner.
Schools such as the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and Singapore Management University are nearby, while several hotels are in the immediate vicinity. Moreover, the proximity to the CBD makes it a convenient option for corporate events and private dining.
“We wanted somewhere accessible for people to keep coming back and keep having their events,” says Belicia.
The menu was shaped by the time Bettina and Alson spent in San Francisco.
Alson trained under renowned restaurateur Michael Mina, whose concepts draw heavily from Mediterranean influences. Bettina worked under Michael Tusk, chef-owner of Quince, a three-Michelin-starred San Francisco institution known for its Italian-inflected cuisine.
The three-course lunch set at The Foundry Table. The menu was shaped by Bettina’s and Alson’s time in San Francisco. (Photo: Manna Concepts)
As a result, The Foundry Table’s menu is designed for sharing, with dishes intended to bring people together over soulful flavours.
The evening tasting menu opens with house-baked focaccia served with extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar, whipped ricotta, honey and dukkah, as an introduction to the communal dining philosophy.
The signature mezze board — a spread of small plates designed for grazing — features falafel, handmade dips, grilled kebabs with mint tzatziki, and charcuterie.
At The Foundry Table’s launch event, the signature mezze board featured bite-sized dishes such as pani puri with avocado and shrimp, serrano ham and marinated feta cheese (Photo: Manna Concepts)
Importantly, much of what arrives at the table is made in-house.
“Wherever possible, we will always make everything from scratch and not get store-bought ingredients,” says Bettina.
Alson adds: “Everyone might think we are crazy for doing so, but you can really taste the difference between freshly baked bread and frozen bread.”
Meant to be shared, the Mediterranean-European cuisine at The Foundry Table is made from scratch and cooked from the heart (Photo: Manna Concepts)
The group’s mixed-revenue model emerged from ambition and difficult lessons learnt on the ground.
Last year, Manna Concepts had to shut a White Tiffin outlet at Ang Mo Kio Hub, after rising rental costs and stiffer competition made it no longer viable.
Belicia points to a structural shift in how Singapore malls tend to lease space today. Over time, a growing number of landlords have been allocating an increasing share of tenancy to F&B operators, with the proportion of retail, fashion and lifestyle tenants shrinking correspondingly.
The result is that many more dining options compete for customer traffic, but overall mall footfall has not grown at the same rate, spreading F&B revenue more thinly across operators. She has observed this trend at numerous commercial properties in Singapore.
The effects of tighter margins and a more crowded field are felt most acutely by mid-tier dining concepts, Belicia says.
Established homegrown names have also shuttered in recent years amid the unforgiving F&B landscape.
For a bootstrapped enterprise like Manna Concepts — which has no external investors and has to fund expansion by reallocating from within — discipline is essential.
“We want to invest every single thing we have back into the business, so we live quite simply,” says Belicia.
The group has also streamlined operations. Two central kitchens anchor production: one halal-certified facility serving Manna Pot Catering, and one non-halal kitchen primarily supporting White Tiffin.
Items that were previously prepared at individual outlets — laksa and mee siam pastes, for instance — are now standardised at the central kitchen, reducing inconsistency and operational load at the outlet level.
Centralised procurement allows the group to consolidate supplier orders and negotiate better pricing.
Maintaining prompt, transparent payment relationships with suppliers has also become a competitive advantage in an environment where restaurant closures have made some suppliers wary.
Besides The Foundry Table, the mixed-revenue model is already in place at The Blue Tiffin at Village Hotel Changi and at The White Tiffin Fusion at Hotel Faber Park.
It is a strategy the group has been implementing more intentionally over the past year. Looking ahead, this will continue to guide how the group grows and develops future restaurant concepts, as they look for more sustainable and flexible operating models.
The team is on the lookout for more sustainable and flexible operating models as they develop more concepts (Photo: Manna Concepts)
For a group that began in a humble home kitchen, the trajectory has been striking — from a mother cooking for neighbours, to a family running eight brands across catering, weddings, floral styling and restaurant dining, with two central kitchens. While the Foundry Table marks the most recent chapter, it is certainly not the last.
A nook at the speakeasy, showcasing Manna Concepts’ brands across catering, weddings, floral styling and restaurants (Photo: Manna Concepts)
In a market where many operators are retreating, the family and team behind Manna Concepts keep finding ways to stay nimble — adapting, reimagining and pressing on.
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