Lao Liang Pork Trotter Jelly & Shark Meat will permanently close its Singapore hawker stall on Oct. 31 after 45 years of continuous operation. The shutdown ends one of the city’s few remaining stalls preparing traditional Teochew pork trotter jelly by hand.
Co-owners Yu Zhongrong and Lin Cailuan, both 75, confirmed they will retire at the end of the month without passing the business to their children. Rising operating demands and the physical toll of preparing the dish forced the decision.
Labor Demands and Slim Unit Economics
Preparation begins at 3 a.m. Daily ahead of a 10 a.m. Opening at Berseh Food Centre in Jalan Besar. The signature pork trotter jelly requires boiling trotters for seven to eight hours under constant stirring, followed by half a day of refrigeration to set the gelatin naturally.
Cleaning and preparing additional braised items takes several more hours each morning. Lao Liang sells individual portions of pork trotter jelly from S$5 ($3.91) and Teochew kway chap sets for S$4, price points that leave little margin against the intense labor required.
Structural Succession Headwinds for Food Centres
The closure reflects an ongoing attrition across Singapore’s hawker and casual dining footprint, where multi-decade operators face generational handover bottlenecks. Younger workers consistently reject arduous kitchen prep shifts that deliver low gross yields, leaving aging founders with liquidation as their sole exit strategy.
For food court managers and government landlords, these exits accelerate the transition toward centralized prep kitchens and standardized fast-casual menus. Heritage recipes that depend entirely on manual butchery and extended braising cycles are disappearing from municipal centres as private operators find them commercially unviable at entry-level hawker prices.
From Theatre Street Pushcarts to Berseh
The business traces back to Yu’s grandfather, who ran a Teochew eatery in mainland China before bringing the trotter recipe to Singapore. Yu began working the family’s pushcart along Theatre Street near the former Thong Chai Medical Institution during the 1960s at age 10.
Yu and Lin assumed full ownership in 1987 when operations shifted into the now-demolished Hill Street Food Centre. The business relocated to its current second-floor unit at Berseh Food Centre in 1998, maintaining its five-day weekly schedule for the subsequent 28 years.
Final Weeks of Trading
Regular customers, many of them elderly diners who have bought from the stall since childhood, will have through late October to visit the counter. The stall continues to operate Wednesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. To 2 p.m. At unit #02-37 until its final service on Oct. 31.