Hotelier and restaurateur Yenn Wong on how a crisis launched her career
Hotelier and restaurateur has made some bold moves since being thrown into the deep end more than 10 years ago
Hotelier and restaurateur Yenn Wong was only 23 years old and newly graduated when she helmed her first major project, designing the JIA boutique hotel in Causeway Bay.
"It wasn't something that I planned, it was more of an opportunity that happened," Wong says. It was during the 2003 Sars crisis in Hong Kong that her father, Malaysian business tycoon Danny Wong, thought it was a good time to invest. "So, he bought that little building in Causeway Bay and he basically just said, 'OK, you want to be an entrepreneur? You figure out what to do with that building'."
Yenn Wong decided to turn the building, just off Jardine's Bazaar, into Hong Kong's first designer boutique hotel.
"I used to travel a lot with my family and I used to love to stay in boutique hotels, so I thought Hong Kong was ready for a boutique hotel."
Reflecting on the project, Wong admits it was a bold step because of her inexperience. "I just thought, 'Oh, let's just do it' without thinking too much about it," she says.
"We looked at it from an investor point of view as well, for the building is tiny, but it is in a very interesting, bustling location in Causeway Bay. Also, financially, in order to get a better return on the investment, we felt doing something like this would be interesting."
Several years later, she opened JIA Shanghai and its Italian restaurant Issimo a year later. In 2006, Wong turned to her hometown of Singapore, adding her first restaurant, Graze, to the city in a black and white colonial-style house with a 5,000 sq ft garden in Rochester Park.
