Beppu Menkan began with a trip to Japan. Our founder, a food connoisseur from Hong Kong, visited Kyushu and came back struck by the eight jigoku, the famous hell hot springs of the onsen town of Beppu, ponds of scalding water so strange in color and temper that the locals had named them for the underworld centuries ago. He named his restaurant after the town, and he took the hells with him: jigoku is the word for hell, and the Japanese use it for anything hot, spicy and exciting, which is a fair description of what he wanted the eating to be. A paradise on earth was the phrase in the founding documents, borrowed from what the springs themselves are called.
Hong Kong first
The first Beppu Menkan opened in Hong Kong as a new-age Japanese restaurant. A Singaporean partner who was struck by the same springs and the same idea joined to expand it, and together they grew it into a chain of five restaurants across the city. The menu that traveled with them was the one Kyushu had taught: pork bone soup, the southern school, in a dining scene that had learned its Japanese food from the chicken-stock kitchens of central Japan. Alongside the ramen came a kitchen rule that has survived every border crossing, no monosodium glutamate, across a menu that ran past eighty dishes.
Then Singapore, 1999
In 1999 that partner brought Beppu Menkan home to Singapore, opening at 134 Amoy Street in Far East Square, in the middle of the Shenton Way bustle. The neighbourhood has changed around us since, and so has the address, today you find us at 3 Pickering Street in China Square Central, a few streets over from where the first local bowl was served, still inside the same shophouse belt between Telok Ayer and Chinatown.
The press noticed early. When The Sunday Times reviewed us in 2005, the piece ran under the advice to have an ambulance on standby, and reported that the kitchen was sending out some twenty eight-chilli ramen bowls a week, most of them to young women, and that their own reporter surrendered after one sip of the top level. The reporter's findings stand. Our owner eats level two.
The eight hells, one kitchen
The founding idea set two scales in motion: eight jigoku ramen, one for each of the hot springs that started everything, and a chilli ladder for the heat. The hells still number eight. The ladder has grown since, from a top of eight in the early years to sixteen today, and the count is still the customer's own to choose, a number that has outlived the paper forms it was once ticked on.
What the founders built that lasted
Some of the founding menu has become story: the wasabi onigiri that dared customers to catch fire left the menu long ago, and the frozen fruit yogurts sold under the name Hell Freezes Over survive only as a memory of the early dessert list. What stayed is the spine of the thing. The pork bone soup, cooked without shortcuts and without MSG. The hand-made gyoza, folded in the kitchen the way the first kitchens folded them. The chilli paste, built on a recipe the suppliers once complained about handling, because it seared their hands. And one quiet detail that regulars know: the telephone number. 6438 0328 has answered for Beppu Menkan since the Far East Square days. Call it and you reach the same kitchen, the same soup, and the same scale of hells.