Before he became a hawker, Carmal Ahmad, 33, was working in the corporate industry as a fund operations associate. These days, he’s also working in a ‘corporate environment’ — at Tanjong Pagar in the CBD, where he’s running his own hawker stall called Mad Bros SG. The nine-month-old stall specialises in wallet-friendly halal Japanese ramen, with island-wide delivery. It includes a tori paitan bowl with creamy paitan broth, made by boiling chicken feet and carcasses instead of traditional tonkotsu-style pork bones.

Carmal graduated with an economics and finance degree from the University of London via SIM. While he was working a salaried job, he yearned to run his own business. “I wanted another challenge. I don’t want to be praising bosses for the rest of my life,” he jokes to 8days.sg. Initially, he thought of opening a restaurant, but changed plans after stumbling upon NEA’s incubation stall programme (he was also recently spotlighted on the stat board’s Facebook page to promote the programme). He named the stall Mad Bros after his brother and himself (“our surname is Ahmad”).

It took Carmal “a while” to convince his parents about his career switch. He recalls, “They’re old-school parents. My mother said, ‘You have a degree. Why don’t you get a good salary-based job?’ And being Asian, I also feel the pressure to step up and support them out of filial piety.”

His parents, who used to run a Malay food stall at Maris Stella High School, were also concerned as they had experienced the hardships of being in F&B. But they eventually came around to support their son. Carmal shares, “I run the stall with my beloved mother now. I do the cooking, she does the preparation [of food]. She’s my biggest pillar of strength, and my biggest critic (laughs).”

As the startup cost of opening a hawker stall is not high, Carmal reckons it’s a good “test bed” before he invests in a restaurant. As practice, he also did a ramen pop-up at a Marina Bay event for 10 days. “There were Japanese customers around, so I had to be thick-skinned and ask if they’d like to try [my food] and give their feedback,” he recalls. “I got quite a good response!”

He decided to sell ramen as he had “always liked Japanese cuisine and anything that’s soupy, and Singapore has a lack of halal Japanese food”. As he didn’t have any culinary experience, he journeyed to Japan and enlisted the help of a native friend to learn how to cook ramen. As his friend worked in the tourism industry, she was able to link Carmal up with F&B folks like hotel chefs, who imparted some ramen-making knowledge to him. “I didn’t learn from the ramen masters, but I picked up [tips] here and there and came up with my own recipes. I was flying back and forth to Japan for a while to learn the trade,” shares Carmal.

According to him, making creamy chicken paitan is “one of the hardest things”, as “[chicken carcasses] have less fat compared to pork bones”. He boils the ingredients for “five to eight hours” to make the broth. There are seven types of ramen on his menu, including the Tori Pai Tan ($6.90) with chicken char shu, in your choice of a shio or shoyu soup base (a spicy version is also available for the same price). There’s also Miso Ramen ($7.90), Miso Butter Ramen ($8.40), Curry Chicken Ramen ($6.90), Curry Cutlet Ramen ($7.90) and a fancier Truffle Ramen ($9.90). Other than noodles, the menu also offers Chicken Curry Rice ($5.90) and Chicken Cutlet Rice ($7.90) as well as Ayam Geprek (Indonesian-style smashed fried chicken drizzled with sambal chilli) in three levels of spiciness ($6.90-$7.90).