The smallest restaurant Souper Tang ever ran came in under 1,100 square feet. The smallest it will open now is 2,500, and the difference between those two numbers is a table.
Souper Tang is a Malaysian herbal-soup chain, established in 2009 as Taang Shifu by two Chinese physicians and run as a group since 2012 by their son, Nevinn Leow, now its group chief executive and managing director.
The smallest it will open now is 2,500, and the difference between those two numbers is a table.
Its Mid Valley Megamall restaurant was the seventeenth in Malaysia. Leow puts the group at about twenty locations today, and it opened at Raffles City in Singapore on 29 July.
The company’s repositioning gets told as a brand story. The operating version is a real-estate story, and it has a number in it.
The number was bought with research before it was paid for in leases. Around 2014 the group put more than 3,000 respondents through an independent research firm, four months of surveys and street interviews, and the finding came back plain: customers filed Taang Shifu under healing, a place for the unwell, and half of every soup was herbs. “It was too much for everyday consumers.”
The research surfaced a second defect no one inside had priced. The name itself drifted by dialect, Taang Shifu in one town and Tongshifu in the Cantonese-reading ones, so the brand could not even be pronounced uniformly across the markets it planned to enter.
The rebranding exercise that followed took two years end to end. Deliciousness became the base and health the bonus, and the first Souper Tang opened new at Mid Valley Megamall in 2015 while fifteen legacy outlets kept trading under the old name.1
Taang Shifu had been built for a customer who came for the herbs, and its rooms were sized to match: small, quick, a menu people ate alone on a weekday.
Souper Tang was built for the opposite occasion. Leow’s target is working executives and health-conscious families, and in Chinese dining a family means a roundtable.
“In Chinese culture roundtable is essential, that’s why we need to incorporate more roundtables and with VIP rooms to cater to bigger families offering privacy.”
A roundtable seating ten, with private rooms around it, does not fit into 1,100 square feet at any rent. Souper Tang’s outlets now run from 2,500 square feet up to 6,000, with VIP rooms and space for private events.
That floor condemned a large share of the estate the company already had.
Leow closed outlets in the 1,000-to-1,800 square-foot band on size alone, and then went further, taking the group out of the Klang Valley across three years, twelve outlets in total. Size was one reason. The other was that Shah Alam and Klang were not where the new customer lived.1
Three years of absence from the country’s richest market is the price on the ticket, and Leow pays it out loud. “In business, revenue is attractive but given a wrong positioning will tarnish the brand in the long run.”
What made the exit affordable is the part most operators skip.
The group had launched two more F&B brands in 2016, and Leow used them as the landing ground. Where a Klang Valley lease sat in a good location at the wrong size, the site was converted to one of the other concepts rather than surrendered, while the company searched the same mall, or a new town, for a unit big enough for Souper Tang.
A second brand is a use for the square footage the first one has outgrown.
A second brand is a use for the square footage the first one has outgrown.
The multi-brand strategy is usually sold upward as a growth story, a way to catch more of the customer’s week. Its harder value sits in the other direction: it is what lets an operator act on a positioning mistake without writing off the lease that carries it.
Souper Tang went back into the Klang Valley once it could get the room it wanted, and has since added Penang, Sarawak and Singapore.
Singapore is where the floor turned out to be measured in something other than square feet.
The group first entered in 2016, at The Centrepoint, through a franchise and joint venture. The partner exited along the way, and the Malaysian head office found itself running one restaurant in another country directly: Singapore employment rules, recruitment, GST collection, financial and regulatory reporting, all of it from Kuala Lumpur.
What doesn’t necessarily appear in the restaurant’s P&L is the management complexity behind running a business in another jurisdiction.
“What doesn’t necessarily appear in the restaurant’s P&L is the management complexity behind running a business in another jurisdiction.”
One outlet was consuming the management framework of a network that had never materialised. When the three-year tenancy came up for renewal in 2019, Leow declined it, and the group left the market the same way it had left the Klang Valley, deliberately and without a replacement site in hand.2
The return took the shape the first entry lacked. Raffles City opened on 29 July under a local partner who already runs a chain of restaurants in Singapore, so the HR, finance, operations and central-kitchen floor exists locally, and the Malaysian head office holds only the brand, the recipes and the standard.
Which is the same decision as the 2,500 square feet, transposed. Below a certain size of room the brand cannot seat the family it exists for; below a certain size of local structure it cannot run the restaurant it opened. Leow now prices both floors before signing, and the square footage is simply the version of the number a landlord can print.
Every repositioning has a number like 2,500 buried in it. Most companies find theirs late, on a lease already signed, for a customer they have only just decided to want.
Footnotes
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The first Souper Tang was not a converted Taang Shifu. Leow opened it new, at Mid Valley Megamall in 2015, and left fifteen legacy outlets trading under the old name while the group worked out which of them the new brand could use. Quotes are from Leow’s August 2026 interview with CÈ’s AI interviewer, lightly normalised for print, wording untouched, transcripts on file. The research sample, its duration and findings are his account; the firm and its fee he declined to disclose. ↩ ↩2
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Leow dates the Centrepoint exit decision to the 2019 tenancy renewal and the closure to 2020, and names no single trigger: commercial performance, tenant turnover around the site, and the post-partner management load all sat on the same side of the ledger. ↩