SINGAPORE — At Maxwell Food Centre, customers have been buying the same distinctive, deep-fried Fuzhou oyster cakes from one family for more than six decades.
But when 43-year-old Deitrich Mohan steps behind the wok, some customers do something unexpected: they hesitate.
Some reportedly assume he is a foreign worker. Others wonder whether the famous stall has changed owners. A few have even walked toward the counter, noticed him cooking and turned away.
What many of them do not realise is that Mohan is not a newcomer at all.
He is the third generation of the family behind Maxwell Fuzhou Oyster Cake, a hawker business started by his maternal grandmother, the late Madam Pang Siew Ting, on Tras Street in 1962. The stall moved to Maxwell Food Centre in 1986 and has since earned recognition from the Michelin Guide.
And after spending years pursuing a completely different career in gaming and esports, Mohan has returned to help ensure that the family recipe does not disappear.
From esports stages to a hawker-centre wok
Mohan did not originally plan to spend his early 40s frying oyster cakes.
After studying film at LASALLE College of the Arts, he worked in events and production before building an approximately 11- to 12-year career in the gaming industry. His roles ranged from hosting gaming events to organising esports tournaments and managing online communities and social-media platforms.
At one point, his ambition was to travel internationally as an emcee for major esports competitions.
The family hawker business remained somewhere in his future plans, however.
By his 30s, Mohan had already decided that he would eventually return to the stall, initially imagining that he would make the transition at around age 45.
That timetable suddenly accelerated.
In 2024, Mohan was retrenched from a Chinese gaming company where he had worked for slightly more than two years. After taking roughly three months off in Japan, he returned to Singapore and joined the family stall full-time in October 2024.
It turned out to be less of a career reinvention than a return to something that had surrounded him for much of his life.
As a child, Mohan often spent time around the stall. He attended kindergarten nearby, ate lunch there and sometimes slept at the back of the business. He later helped out during his secondary-school and polytechnic years and before National Service.
A hawker dish that has survived more than six decades
Maxwell Fuzhou Oyster Cake specialises in a food that has become increasingly uncommon in Singapore.
Its signature fritter is filled with ingredients including minced pork, oysters, prawns and coriander, wrapped in batter and deep-fried until crisp.
Michelin continues to list the stall at Maxwell Food Centre, #01-05, describing its oyster cakes as having a crisp exterior while the meat and seafood inside remain soft and juicy.
Earlier reporting also traces the business to Mohan’s grandmother, Pang Siew Ting, who began selling the snack to help support her children.
Today, Mohan works alongside his mother, 69-year-old Hoon Poh Hwa, the second-generation hawker who spent decades keeping the stall alive.
Yahoo Singapore interviewed Hoon in 2024, when she revealed that her son had already expressed interest in eventually returning to the business — a possibility that has since become reality.
Mother and son now divide the working day. Hoon handles the earlier shift, while Mohan comes in later and remains until the stall closes at around 8pm.
But some customers see his face before they see the food
Mohan is of Chinese and Indian heritage, and he told CNA that his appearance has repeatedly shaped how strangers respond to him.
At the stall, some customers have assumed that he is not Singaporean. Others have questioned whether he really belongs behind the wok.
Mohan said their reactions sometimes change once he responds to them fluently in Mandarin.
The encounters echo experiences he said he faced while growing up mixed-race in Singapore.
He attended Anglo-Chinese School and grew up largely immersed in Chinese culture, but said he struggled at times to feel fully accepted by either his Chinese or Indian peers. He also recalled being questioned about his presence at Chinese New Year gatherings and Chinese temples.
Mohan nevertheless avoids automatically characterising every awkward customer interaction at Maxwell as racist.
He told CNA that some longtime patrons may simply be startled when a familiar hawker is replaced at the wok by someone they do not recognise, while older customers may express questions about race more bluntly than younger Singaporeans would.
There have, however, been more overt remarks. Mohan recalled one customer commenting on the dark colour of an oyster cake and comparing it with his skin tone.
Rather than allowing such encounters to determine whether he belongs at the stall, Mohan has increasingly focused on the people who know him and the heritage he is now carrying forward.
The stall is also repairing a relationship
His decision to become a hawker has produced another consequence that has little to do with food.
It has brought him closer to his mother.
Hoon raised Mohan largely as a single parent after separating from his father when he was around eight years old. She was simultaneously working long hours in the family business.
Mother and son did not always have an easy relationship. Mohan said they communicated poorly when he was younger, and during his teenage years they barely spoke.
Working together decades later has given them another opportunity.
They now spend their days side by side at Maxwell and also live together in Tanjong Pagar. Mohan told CNA that he sees the time with his mother as a chance to recover years they lost when he was younger.
That makes his career change more than a business decision.
It is simultaneously about family, identity and time.
Why the story matters beyond one Maxwell stall
Singapore’s hawker culture was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2020.
UNESCO specifically notes that many Singapore hawkers specialise in dishes refined over many years and pass their recipes, knowledge and skills to younger family members or apprentices.
That description could almost have been written for Maxwell Fuzhou Oyster Cake.
Singapore’s National Environment Agency even operates a Hawkers Succession Scheme aimed at helping veteran hawkers transfer recipes, skills and established stalls to younger successors when no family member is available to take over.
For the Mohan family, however, succession has happened within the bloodline.
What began with Pang Siew Ting in 1962 passed to Hoon Poh Hwa and is now being learned and preserved by her son.
The recipe has crossed three generations.
The bigger question is how much longer it can survive.
Mohan has already picked a target: 2062
Mohan says he does not simply want to keep the stall running for another few years.
His ambition is to take Maxwell Fuzhou Oyster Cake all the way to its 100th anniversary in 2062.
He would be around 79 years old by then.
And if the family business ultimately ends with him, Mohan told CNA that he could accept that — provided it does not disappear shortly after he takes over.
For a man who once imagined travelling the world under esports arena lights, the new dream is considerably more local: one wok, one stall and one increasingly rare Fuzhou snack at Maxwell Food Centre.
Customers may still occasionally look twice when they see him behind the counter.
But the face they are questioning belongs to the very family that has kept those oyster cakes frying for more than 60 years.
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