Fifteen years, insists the MasterChef Singapore judge, is a “damn long time”.
“I got a 15-year itch,” he said. “Seven-year itch times two, plus one.”
That itch wasn’t new. At Artichoke’s 10th anniversary, Shen, 43, had tried to push for a concept change, even pitching “a modern Singaporean barbecue restaurant” and “a Vietnamese barbecue restaurant”. His team shot him down. “They told me, ‘Where are people going to get hummus if not from us?’ They were more attached to the cuisine than I was.”
Now, with a younger team, the timing feels right: Business had slowed in the last six months and the economy isn’t exactly buzzing.
“When things are slow, people wait. I fight,” he said. “Why sit around when you can change the whole restaurant?”
The announcement that Artichoke was pivoting to pizza brought consternation. Reactions ranged from “No! Why? I don’t want to come already” to “Why are you jumping on the bandwagon and copying a trend?”
Of course, what these people had perhaps forgotten was that he’d started doing mad pizza omakase experiments five years ago at Small’s and, over the years, served up charcoal-grilled pizzas in Jakarta and “neo-Neapolitan” pies in Bali.
