Pierre Png has a lot to celebrate in 2021. Not only did his wife Andrea De Cruz recently receive a clean bill of health for her liver transplant (which Pierre donated in 2002), the couple, both 47, are opening a restaurant-bar called Tipsy Flamingo at Raffles City.

The beach-themed venue is part of the Singapore-based Tipsy Collective, which runs other concepts like oyster bar Tipsy Penguin, O/T Bar and mod Asian rooftop bar Lady Wu. It opens officially on Aug 19, 2021.

Pierre and Andrea came to partner the collective for its latest venture after getting to know the owners Derek Ong and David Gan. In a chat with 8days.sg, the Crazy Rich Asians ​​​​​​​star says: “We were introduced to the partners at Tipsy some years back, and we hit it off quite well. We’d visit their different outlets and enjoy ourselves. We jokingly told them, ‘If you open anything else in the future [please call us]’, and they took us up on it.”

Before opening Tipsy Flamingo, Pierre also co-owned 3O1 Bar & Kitchen at HomeTeamNS Sembawang with two other partners. They closed it in 2020 after almost four years.

According to Pierre, the bar’s location was converted to a quarantine site, which affected their operations. “We were out of business for about six to eight months,” he says. “Our lease was coming to an end, it was really hard but the three of us decided there was no point carrying on.”

But Pierre, who holds a diploma in tourism studies from Shatec, has “always been interested in F&B and hospitality”. He shares, “It’s every guy’s dream to own an extended kitchen to host all of his friends and make sure everyone is having fun (laughs). Andrea herself, when she was studying overseas, used to work as a waitress too.”

He also has experience bartending in his teens. “I was a bartender at Hard Rock Cafe, that was some time back lah,” he recalls. “The last place I tended the bar at was [’90s pub chain] Europa. I was maybe 17, 18? I like introducing things to people, and since I dealt with beverages, food came naturally.”

He remembers stumbling into the bartending scene by accident. “I wanted to work in a restaurant, and they happened to have an opening for a bartender. So they said, ‘Why don’t you try bartending?’” he says.

Pierre went through old-school training, where “the bar was a privileged place for diners to sit at”. He details: “Bartenders used to train me saying, ‘The bar should be so clean that you should be able to eat off it and sleep on the floor.’ We had to serve the freshest peanuts and anchovies. If you sat by the bar you’d be entertained. I was taught how to play games and bar etiquette, like ‘Whatever you hear at the bar stays at the bar’.”

He acknowledges that he wishes “the situation was better” for opening a new bar. “But we had already planned this before Covid-19 happened. If we procrastinate any longer, we might just lose some of the winning factors we have, he says.

Check out some of the food and drinks you can order at Tipsy Flamingo below:

Tipsy Flamingo opens Aug 19 at #01-17A Raffles City Shopping Centre, 252 North Bridge Rd, S179103.