Although it’s tucked inside a quiet industrial building in Aljunied, two-week-old Pondok Indah Indonesian Nasi Padang manages to attract snaking long queues on a daily basis. Customers often have to wait up to an hour for their food during peak periods.
As it turns out, the 65-seater eatery already had a cult following from pre-Covid times – the biz first opened at a Siglap coffee shop in 1998, and had a total of seven outlets across several kopitiams in Ubi, Kallang and Bedok Reservoir, until it shut down in 2019. It reopened as a larger standalone air-con restaurant in Johnson’s Building on 1 July.
The popular stall is owned by Indonesian-born Chinese Lindawaty Siam, 64, who moved to Singapore in 1994 after marrying her local husband. The cook, who got her Singapore citizenship in 2005, worked at several F&B establishments before opening Pondok Indah, including at a cai fan hawker stall and an army camp canteen. She learned the basics of how to cook nasi padang from a friend who owned a nasi padang hawker stall, and later went on to open her own shop. Currently, Lindawaty runs her biz together with her 40-year-old son, John Ng.
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