Benny Se Teo named his restaurant after a street gang.

Not as a joke or as irony.
As a reminder.
The number 18 refers to a well-known Singaporean gang, the world Benny Se Teo came from before he built the world he lives in now.

The restaurant is called Eighteen Chefs.

If you've eaten there, you've eaten in a place built by a man who spent a decade going in and out of prison for heroin addiction, who was rejected from six job interviews because of his criminal record, and who discovered he could cook while serving tea to the prison superintendent.

That last detail is the one that changes everything.

Benny's father was an opium addict who ran an opium den. Benny was exposed to drugs before he was old enough to understand what they were, and by 15 he was using. By his twenties, he was on heroin.

He went to prison four times and to rehabilitation centres more times than he could count. "I have been in and out of prison and rehabilitation centres so many times I cannot keep count," he told Daniel Food Diary in an interview.

At 33, a near-death experience forced him to stop.

He spent six years in a halfway house trying to rebuild his life. He applied for jobs. He was rejected from six interviews in a row, every time because of his prison record. In 1993, sitting with the weight of those six rejections, he made a vow to himself: if he ever got the chance, he would create jobs for people like him, people society had decided were too broken to hire.

It took him 14 years to keep that promise.

While serving time, Benny had worked as a tea boy to the prison superintendent. It was there, in the quiet routine of preparing drinks and small meals, that he discovered something nobody expected, least of all himself: he had a gift for food. He could taste a dish once and recreate it. He could improvise with whatever was available.

In 2005, at 45 years old, he opened his first restaurant, a small place called Goshen.

In 2006, he heard about Jamie Oliver's Fifteen, a London restaurant that trained disadvantaged youth, including people with drug and alcohol problems, the unemployed, and the homeless. Benny read everything he could about it. Then he saved enough money to fly to London and talked his way into an internship, persuading Fifteen's CEO Liam Black to let him in.

He became the first Singaporean to work at Fifteen.

He worked six days a week, 8am to 11pm, learning under chefs like Gennaro Contaldo, the man who mentored Jamie Oliver himself. He came home with Western culinary technique and a model for what a restaurant could be when its purpose was bigger than profit.

Goshen folded shortly after he returned. His first restaurant failed.

He didn't stop.

In 2007, he co-founded Eighteen Chefs with two partners.

The concept was casual Western food at affordable prices, served in a space where ex-offenders and at-risk youth could work without judgment.

Thirty-five percent of his employees are former offenders or people in addiction recovery. Some of his managers and head chefs are ex-convicts and former hardcore drug addicts who came through his kitchen and proved themselves.

"I've been there," he told Weekly Sparks. "Society is unforgiving. No one will hire an ex-convict."

He also says something most social entrepreneurs don't say: some of his employees relapse. They go back to prison. He loses people he invested in. And he keeps hiring because the alternative is a world where nobody gives them a chance at all.

Spirit of Enterprise honouree in 2009. President's Challenge Social Enterprise of the Year in 2012. Emerging Enterprise in 2013. Ten outlets at peak.

In November 2021, after 14 years, Benny retired from Eighteen Chefs and The MeatHouse. He left on good terms and now works as a motivational speaker and F&B consultant, sharing his story with audiences across Singapore.

The chain continues without him, still operating 10 outlets, and every franchise agreement still carries his original condition: you must hire ex-offenders.

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Benny Se Teo...

He named his restaurant after the gang he used to run with, not to glorify it but to refuse to hide from it.

Most people who escape that world want to erase it. Benny put the number on the signboard. He's telling every ex-offender who walks through the door: I know where you've been because I've been there too, and this place exists because of it, not despite it.

The tea boy detail is the one I can't stop thinking about. A heroin addict serving tea to the prison superintendent, discovering in that small routine that his hands could make something people wanted to eat. That's not a career pivot. That's a life finding a reason to continue when every other reason had been used up.

His father ran an opium den. His son runs a restaurant chain that hires the people society throws away. That's not just redemption. That's a man rewriting a family story that was supposed to end in the same place it started.

14 years between the vow and the restaurant. 6 rejections, 4 prison terms, one failed restaurant, and a signboard with the number of a street gang hanging above a kitchen full of second chances.