Maureen Suan Neo – from restauranteur to queen of Nonya Secrets sauces. What’s the secret to her success?

Did your parents ever ask you to do chores when you were young that you resented? Little did Maureen Suan Neo know that all that pounding of lemongrass would lead to a glittering career in food. Nonya Secrets sauces are a range of Malaysian/Chinese sauces, most of which started life in her restaurant kitchens. She has 31 years as a restauranteur under her belt. At her peak, she ran 4 restaurants in London with her husband, John Arumainayagam in London. Within 3 years of opening her first restaurant, Singapura (Malay for Singapore), in Fulham, Loyd Grossman named it as one of his top 100 London restaurants in a Sunday Times article in 1985.

The neighbourhood restaurant garnered a celebrity following including Helen Mirren, Andrew Neil and Loyd Grossman. “Of course, it was a huge success”, Maureen recalls. When the lease of the restaurant was due to expire, her customers suggested moving it to “the City where the money was and I would do well there”. With her customers’ idea humming in her ears, she launched in the City. Over the next 4 years, she opened a string of restaurants in quick succession, the first one in Leadenhall Street in the City in 1993. “From Day 1, it was full. There were queues round the block”, she proudly pronounces. Other openings followed in St Paul’s and Covent Garden. In 1997, a new fine-dining concept ensued, called Suan Neo Restaurant in Broadgate.

“We had fantastic reviews from eg Fay Maschler”, Maureen tells me. In 1995, her cookbook on Nonya cuisine, “Red Heat” was published. Loyd Grossman proclaimed his love for her food by describing her as “one of the best Asian cooks in Europe” in his 1998 book, “The 125 best recipes ever”. Her “Kalio” (Indonesian braised beef) recipe appeared alongside those by other culinary luminaries, such as Michel Roux, Joel Robuchon, Raymond Blanc and Gordon Ramsay.

Her hard work won her much recognition and praise from her customers and media attention. This acted as a springboard to television appearances (on ITV’s This Morning and Food Network) and demonstrations with celebrity chefs, such as on the BBC Good Food Show with James Martin, cementing her reputation as an established cook. She has done cookery classes and private catering including a fundraising event in 2015 attended by the then Mayor of London, and now our current Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. Her energy does not seem to have waned with age. She tells me that she recently cooked for 80 people at a party, single-handedly. She is 66 years old.

Winding back the clock, aged 19, originally from Singapore, she saved enough money to fly to England to go on a secretarial course. She had wanted to go to university in Singapore but her parents could not afford it. “I just came [to England] with a suitcase, that’s it”. She worked as a secretary “because that was the fastest way to earn money” and at the same time, did evening classes to become a company secretary. She wanted a career and was ambitious.

“I started to cook in earnest when I came to the UK. I had to fend for myself. I had learned from my mum in Singapore. I was always her helper. Aged 4 or 5, I started with the easy jobs like peeling onions. Mum, a Nonya [a Chinese/Malaysian wife], cooked at least half a dozen of dishes for lunch and different dishes again for dinner”.

In early 1980’s, Maureen and her husband, John entertained a great deal at home. Bowled over by her food, their friends advocated opening a Singaporean restaurant. Very few Southeast Asian restaurants were around and even fewer female head chefs.

In 1982, their first restaurant in Fulham was born and so was their eldest daughter. She “was born the day before the [restaurant] opening. I had to go into hospital. So, I missed the opening night. Everyone was so busy with the restaurant; they didn’t even have time to come and see me in the hospital.”

Her restaurants captured the zeitgeist of excesses in the 1990’s and noughties. Maureen recalls, “In the City, in the early days before the expense account limitations, people were drinking very heavily. They would have aperitifs, liqueurs afterwards and lunches would go on for hours, especially in Leadenhall Street. They would be there from 1 pm till 5 or 6 pm, drinking away.”

After 20 years of successful trading, business took a tumble following the 9/11 bombing in New York in 2001 with worldwide stocks taking a freefall. “Things started going downhill, things became very difficult”, Maureen said. She and John wisely decided to switch their business model at Suan Neo Restaurant from fine dining to the more affordable mid-priced Singapura restaurant concept. They tightened their belts and did not take on new premises to replace their Leadenhall Street site in 2004. The global economy took a seismic downturn after Lehman Bros’ bankruptcy in 2008. They closed their flagship restaurant in St Paul’s in 2009.

She recounted: “The banking crisis made it all change, expense accounts were cut and we didn’t get the spend. I heard that if they spent more than £25 a head, they wouldn’t get their expenses paid.” She continued: “Things started changing. Lunches became shorter and shorter, 1 hour, 45 minutes, then lunch at desk. We had to serve everything in minutes.”

To accommodate City workers’ shorter lunch breaks, in 2004, the couple turned half of the Broadgate restaurant into a take-away. “We kept half of it as a proper restaurant. We didn’t really know what we were doing”. By 2006, it became a take-away only site and was rebranded as “ASAP Deli”. “There were queues round the building. It was a huge success”. In 2009, they dared to open another branch in Holborn despite the turbulent economic climate. The 2 sites were catering for about 600/700 meals a day.

However, Maureen explains: “The margins on take-away food is a lot smaller than restaurants where you would make money on the wine. So, we decided to wind it all up” when the leases on both premises expired in 2013, anticipating a steep rise in rent on top of business rates.

John reminisces fondly, “When we shut the restaurants, we got tons of email, asking ‘When are you opening your next restaurant?’”. Maureen chimed in: “Customers wrote to me, wondering ‘Where can we eat your food? We miss your cooking’”. They had already started selling their sauces at the restaurants. Emboldened by encouragement from their former customers, they initially offered 2 sauces and then extended the range to 10 including some vegan ones, each one amassing a Great Taste Award.

Nonya Secrets cooking sauces derived from “recipes handed down from my Peranakan heritage, a fusion of Chinese and Malay cultures which emanates from the intermarriage of Chinese settlers to the indigenous Malays in the 16thcentury”, Maureen enthuses. The spicy peanut one was her father’s recipe and the Nonya Sambal one derived from her mother. Maureen miraculously squeezes in layers and layers of flavours from an orchestra of ingredients, such as lemongrass, galangal, turmeric, chillis and the list goes on. The sauces are made locally, importing fresh lemongrass and galangal from Vietnam while dispensing with any preservatives. She refuses to use chemicals to prolong shelf life, for fear of ruining the taste. Using her sauces is like eating her restaurant food, vacuum packed in a jar.

Do Maureen and John miss the restaurant trade? “Sometimes”, says John but a resounding “No” from Maureen: “I am a very hard task master [in the kitchen]. I spent a lot of time in the kitchen”, in addition to the pressure of creating new recipes. She explains: “The dinner party ambience was replaced with a high intensity business environment.” She found the customers’ appreciation of and recognition for her food “very rewarding”. Some customers have become and are still friends. But running a group of restaurants was no mean feat, being under financial pressure, responsible for training the chefs and finding trained chefs willing to work in an Asian restaurant.

“The daily compliments that I now get with the sauce company is even more pleasing”, she says sprightly. She brims with excitement, talking about “the endless opportunities” with the sauce business, such as increasing online sales and UK stockists as well as expanding overseas.

Maureen’s drive is fathomless.I was originally due to meet her at one of the food fairs but she was too ill to attend.Not being able to sit still, she decided to finish cutting the hedge at home. Her next career?“I would be happy to pursue a career as a celebrity chef and follow in the footsteps of Mary Berry and Madhur Jaffery.”Aged 66, she could be a young Singaporean Mary Berry.Let’s thank her mother too for all the kitchen chores that Maureen was made to do.

Nonya Secrets sauces are available online www.nonyasecrets.com and from Wholefoods, Harrods, Fenwicks Foodhall and other stockists - see its website.

August 2019