“Botak Jones was one of the few places I could bring my girlfriend for a decent Western meal,” remembers Joshua Gan, 40, who is now married to said girlfriend with a 6-year-old son. “I had budget constraints and that was what I could afford back then. I appreciate Botak Jones for offering good food at affordable prices, but more than that, I thank my wife for being willing to have coffee shop hot dates with me. Company is the most important part of ambience.”
Joshua is not alone in having fond memories of Botak Jones. When Bernie Utchenik and his wife Faudziah Mohd Ali (better known as Zee) opened their first outlet at Tuas Industrial Park, introducing Singapore to quality classic American food at kopitiam prices, Botak Jones quickly became the go-to place for Cajun Chicken, steak and truly great burgers. One stall became two, three, five… and at one point, grew to 14.
Bernie, 68, became as iconic as his brand, appearing on radio, TV, in magazine, newspapers, also speaking at entrepreneurship forums. But in 2011, he and Zee sold their stake in Botak Jones to their partners, returning to the scene the same year with Big Bern’s American Grill, which changed locations over the years, starting at Balestier, then at Toa Payoh in 2014, and in 2016, Timbre+ and last year they added on another outlet at Makansutra Gluttons Bay. Both have since closed.
Journalist Judith Tan remembers, “Big Bern’s was next to SPH [in Toa Payoh] and I ate there for dinner whenever I was on late shift. I would usually have the New York strip or the ribeye—after a while, Zee seemed to be able to tell if it was going to be a ribeye or New York night! Then came the jalapeno cheese bombs, which was what we always ordered during tea break. Sometimes we would drink margaritas and eat jalapeños at tea and hope our faces were not red when we went back to the newsroom to continue work.”
This June, Gen Xers got excited all over again because, after an absence of 10 years, The Original Botak Jones opened at the coffee shop at 18 Depot Lane in Telok Blangah. As if they never left, the queues started up again, drawing attention from local media and sending this generation back down memory lane.
SINGAPORE, A LOVE AFFAIR
Bernie, a native of Detroit, USA, came here “on a 747, from New Orleans to Seattle, to Japan to Singapore.” He was in the service industry for oil fields when he arrived, and soon fell in love with Asia. “I felt very at home here,” he says. “If you believe in fate, it felt like there was a reason why I came here. It just felt so much more comfortable than where I had come from.”
His first foray into the food business was in the late ‘90s when he partnered with good friends from work to set up Bernie’s at Changi North—“across from the prison”. The choice of atypical locations would become his trademark.
“I look for places that haven’t been acquainted yet [with American food]. Bernie’s was in a huge industrial estate in Changi. And I always wanted to open up something there for a few reasons. One, there’s no competition in that area. And two, if we wanted to have live music, there was no one to disturb. So this were these were things very close to my heart being a closet musician,” he explains.
(Bernie loves performing the blues and classic rock. Before the pandemic, Bernie and John Chee, one of the owners of Crazy Elephant formed a band called The John And Bernie Project. “We did a few gigs, which were extremely well received. We got asked back to every place that we played. But at the time we were going to open at Crazy Elephant, everything stopped.” The two are in touch often. “I hope we carry on. It’s very satisfying—we melded very well together.”)
It was at Bernie’s that he met Zee. “My first restaurant was close to where she worked. It started as a strangers-in-the-night kind of thing, and it grew into a mutual attraction. And we’ve been together 40 or 50 years,” he chuckles. “When I say that she laughs. That’s one of the wonderful things about my wife: she doesn’t ask what something means, she doesn’t read anything to anything I say. She knows I’m full of nonsense, and she’s the first one to tell me that.”
Bernie became a Singapore citizen in August 2008. “I felt that I should have ‘some skin in the game’, so to speak,” he says. “I had been thinking about it for years, but there comes a tipping point—due to my age and my long term goals, I felt it was time to fully commit. If dual citizenship were possible, I would have tried to become a citizen sooner.”
If family or friends from the US should come through Singapore one day, he would bring them to places he has enjoyed. “East Coast Lagoon, Sammy’s (Curry), Marina Barrage, Crazy Elephant, food centres and other things like these. I’m not one for the audacious,” he says.
He should know that some of us Gen Xers used to bring our overseas pals for the Botak Jones experience: have your order taken by a cute blond teenager speaking Singapore English and enjoy a great burger in a coffee shop in the heartlands.
THE EMBRACING OF BOTAK JONES
“We were running a kitchen for some close friends of mine, and I realised that it was kind of like being on the tail of the dog,” he says about how Botak Jones was born. “As much as I love and trust both the owners, you never know what’s going to happen. So we wanted to be a little bit more in control of our destiny, and that’s when we opened Botak Jones.”
In 2003, Botak Jones opened for business at Sungei Kadut Eating House in Tuas. Having grown a fan base for their food, Bernie and Zee assumed they would have some business, but were not prepared for the number of people who showed up in Tuas. “I had sent out emails to customers who had been eating our food, but we didn’t know exactly how many of them there were. And the coffee shop was completely what we call slam, which is when you have more people that you really have the right to take care of, but we tried.” The unexpectedly robust turnout meant that the Botak Jones staff, who had been told to just show up and enjoy the opening were roped into the kitchen to work.
“It was bittersweet,” he says. “One of the staffers sent me a terrible text afterwards, but the sweet part was my wife taking orders as she does now, only then there was no POS—it was all paper and pen.”
Just as sweet was an elderly lady who went up to Zee and told her, “I’ve been living in this estate for 35 years and this is the first day the coffee shop has ever been full.” “That touched me very deeply,” Bernie admits.
Word quickly spread, and the media came around—it was one food review or cooking show appearance after another. Before long, Botak Jones had a string of outlets.
One time, Bernie was at the Ang Mo Kio outlet at 608 Ang Mo Kio Ave 5, sitting on a bench in the kopitiam, near a table of “uncles” who ran the other stalls. “They were roughly my age, and all of them were speaking Hokkien, but only one spoke a little bit of English. He would fill me in. ‘Oh, they’re talking about you. They’re saying it took an angmoh to come here and show them how to do business like that.’ I didn’t know how to take it; I didn’t know if it was kind of discriminatory. But later on one of the other people in this group told me how proud they were of our success. They kind of felt that they had a hand in it because the kopitiam started with them. So that was kind of neat: it’s kind of like having a hometown baseball team or hearing ‘We’re rooting for you, man.’”
A large part of Botak Jones’ success, apart from its stellar menu, was how Bernie invested in service quality in a place one least expected to find it. Around the time they opened the first Botak Jones, there was a push by the government for better service for tourist visitors in the food and beverage industry.
“But how is a Singaporean expected to treat a tourist well when they have yet to be treated that way themselves?” Bernie points out. “I’m not talking about people with money who can go to the better restaurants; everybody there, of course, is treated very well. I’m talking about the average Singaporean that eats more than one or two meals a week at a coffee shop or hawker centre. And at that time, Singapore was known for the hawkers yelling at their customers, ‘You wait!’”
Botak Jones fans will tell you that a large part of the appeal was that the staff remembered your face, or was friendly and funny. “I was trying, in my own way, to treat Singaporeans with a service standard that they hadn’t yet experienced in in a canteen or a coffee shop. The way we treated customers, everybody was astounded that we would get so chummy, we knew all our customers, we joked around with them, we put them at ease—they really enjoyed looking forward to coming to us.”
It was unheard of for kopitiam bosses—and many SME bosses—but Bernie invested over $100,000 in service training for his staff by Ron Kaufman, speaker, trainer and New York Times bestselling author of Uplifting Service. “It really made a difference in how people looked at taking care of customers and other people,” he says, adding that if he had the opportunity, he would do it again.
Speaker, presentation coach and former radio personality Joe Augustin “really can’t remember a time not knowing Bernie.” They met when Bernie wanted to do radio commercials for Botak Jones and they worked on the ads together. “We must have done 15, 16 commercials together,” Joe recalls.
“Bernie is someone who’s never taken the easy way out,” he adds. “He always wants to make sure he pays everyone who’s supposed to be paid. A lot of people would’ve done things differently. I’ve always respected him.”
BACK TO THE FUTURE: THE ORIGINAL BOTAK JONES
It hasn’t been an all-peachy journey for Bernie and Zee: apart from the rollercoaster ride of running their businesses, Bernie’s also had health issues. He’s not one to accept sympathy, but he he is matter-of-fact about how at his age, he’s not as rambunctious or high-energy as he was two decades ago.
“The story of Bernie is really the story of Zee,” says Joe Augustin. “They are one of the hardest-working couples I know. It’s like a relay race between the two of—I think it’s incredible some of the heavy-lifting Zee’s had to do. They’re a real team.”
Bernie’s role at The Original Botak Jones (so named as the original Botak Jones brand has expired) is as advisor, while Zee is involved in operations. They are both directors of OG Botak Jones. “I’m like the coach, the manager of the team,” he explains.
The revival of the brand came about with the support of two original fans of the 2000s Botak Jones. “They go back a long ways with me, almost from the very beginning. But they were just getting out of school when we first caught up, and they have done very, very well in their chosen fields. I praise their father because he really has sons who are so solid and so forthright. I’m very, very blessed to have them offer Zee and I this opportunity to redo the brand.”
Their partners insisted that they went back to when Botak Jones was working really well, and recipes weren’t changed. “So we went back to the recipes I had originally, and even the colour of the menus and the way they were written—they wanted everything to be like that, to touch people and bring back memories of Botak Jones,” he says. “And that was one of the reasons that I I suggested the name The Original Botak Jones, so people would realise that we were still the original founders and are vested in this particular generation.
When The Original Botak Jones opened, snaking queues formed and people waited up to 90 minutes for their order. “It’s good to see some old friends, people who remember me from before. The most touching part is all these people who tell me they grew up with Botak Jones—they’re now in their 20s and 30s. But their parents took them to Botak Jones when they were they had to go everywhere with their parents. It’s great.”
What are Bernie Utchenik’s three biggest business lessons? “Lesson number one: love everyone but trust no one. Lesson number two: let people show you who they are rather than tell you. And lesson number three: just go for it. Your whole life, just be going for it.”
Get in line for Botak Jones at 118, Depot Lane, Singpaore 109754. www.originalbotakjones.com.
