Smaller, specialty restaurants in future: Ip

[SINGAPORE] A trend in dining is how consumers are preferring smaller, specialty restaurants, said Crystal Jade chairman and CEO Ip Yiu Tung.

"Even for Chinese food, there are more and more small restaurants, not bigger restaurants," Mr Ip told The Business Times.

People are also preferring simpler food, like what the Crystal Jade Kitchen casual dining outlets offer: Cantonese-style noodles, barbecued meats, dim sum, congee and fried dishes.

In the future, it is possible that the chain will build restaurants that emphasise only one of these offerings, he said.

Mr Ip was speaking at an interview to announce the sale of the Crystal Jade group to private equity fund L Capital Asia.

The Hong Kong citizen was an electrical engineering university dropout, and worked for 10 years in a computer hardware company. He then spent the next few years at a colleague's consumer products business, designing portable battery-operated lantern products that became commerc…