Covid-19 has claimed casualties — patients, and businesses hit hard by the abrupt, drastic drop in customers. One of them is struggling hawker stall Empress Place Teochew Beef Kway Teow, which announced on March 13 that it was shuttering its shop at Maxwell Food Centre for good. The closure comes just slightly shy of a year, after the stall moved there from its longtime Siglap address last May.

The business is run by father-and-daughter David and Melissa Lim, who are related to the family behind the famed Original Hock Lam Street Beef Kway Teow chain (which incidentally also closed permanently last year due to “ever-increasing manpower issues”). Melissa, a former science teacher, had left her MOE teaching job to become a hawker.

It’s sad news for us as a fan of the stall’s delicious beef kway teow; each bowl is crammed with tender, medium rare-pink beef and unctuous, gelatinous tendons that melt in our mouth like a dream. The silken kway teow is best slurped up with the stall’s house-made pineapple purée-infused chilli.

While the final day of operation was originally April 13, Melissa tells 8days.sg that she has decided to wind up early following the government’s latest Covid-19 battle plan. The new month-long “circuit-breaker” measures, the strictest so far, will see “non-essential services” like attractions and sports facilities closed from April 7 till May 4, while F&B businesses are expected to scrape dine-in services and offer only takeaway food.

“With the new measures, we may close as early as next Monday (April 6),” Melissa says, adding that “it doesn’t make sense” for her CBD stall to continue when most of her office crowd regulars are working from home. “We are expected to operate only with takeaway and delivery, but there are no residential areas around us [to form a customer base]. We don’t get that many delivery orders. We may try opening for one more day [after the measures kick in on April 7] from 10.30am to 2pm [instead of the usual 8pm], and see if the response is strong enough for us to open for dinner. If there are party orders, we will go back to prepare it, but we probably won’t continue after that, ’cos I don’t know how long we can last.”

Since Empress Place Teochew Beef Kway Teow moved to Maxwell Food Centre, business had been slow. Located in a quiet, far-flung corner of the hawker centre dominated by popular names like Tian Tian Hainanese Chicken Rice, the stall gets little human traffic. It doesn’t help that it’s also in the vicinity of a construction site for the upcoming Maxwell MRT station, which was recently confirmed to have harboured a cluster of five Covid-19 cases.

“It’s not that near us, but when people hear about ‘Maxwell cluster’ they think of us,” Melissa sighs. “According to the social distancing measures, it’s three [diners] to a table, but today, you can have a whole table to yourself. That’s how bad it is. It’s really horrible now. When business didn’t pick up over the past 10 months, I was thinking of closing and relocating. Maxwell isn’t the place for us.”

But her dad David had been optimistic that things would pick up. “He was like, ‘Wait till the MRT station is done,'” she shares. “But when the virus hit, we immediately felt the impact of it. I told my dad, 'I don’t think this is going to be over any time soon'. It’s just a matter of how much time we can afford to let this drag. I’m the one managing the accounts, so when the figures came in, and we are looking at $280 or $300 [take home pay] a month for the next five months, this isn’t going to work out.”

Melissa admits that her father was reluctant to give up his stall. “He was adamant about continuing, because he had been doing it for so many years. But right now it’s about putting food on the table, paying your bills and taking care of your family. That was when it sank in for him.”

As a litmus test, the duo monitored their business for the month of February 2020. “Once the Covid-19 situation happened, our business dropped immediately by 30%, and went down further to 50%. After deducting the overheads, we each took home only $300. Even if business goes back to what it was before, it wouldn’t be enough to cover our losses from this period,” Melissa says grimly.

She candidly shares that she, too, felt emotional about the stall’s closure. “At first I was quite sad. It seems to be over too fast. But now I’m resigned. It can’t be helped. We don’t have the funds to tide over this, and we keep firefighting. Even Tian Tian Chicken Rice has no queue now.”

Not all is lost for Melissa and David, though. The plucky pair consider their Maxwell stall’s closure as a career hiatus. “It’s not that we are closing for good. Maybe it’s the wrong place or wrong time, or both,” Melissa muses. David is also actively helping his son, John Paul Lim, run his mod beef kway teow stall Gubak Kia at Timbre+ at one-north. Melissa explains, “My brother needed help at his stall ’cos his assistant left, so my dad was shuttling between the two stalls.” Since business there had also slowed after the WFH policy kicked in, father-and-son will both take a brief one-month break and “see how it goes”.