Lao Liang Pork Trotter Jelly & Shark Meat will permanently close its Singapore hawker stall on Oct. 31 after 45 years of continuous operation. The shutdown ends one of the city’s few remaining stalls preparing traditional Teochew pork trotter jelly by hand.

Co-owners Yu Zhongrong and Lin Cailuan, both 75, confirmed they will retire at the end of the month without passing the business to their children. Rising operating demands and the physical toll of preparing the dish forced the decision.

Preparation begins at 3 a.m. Daily ahead of a 10 a.m. Opening at Berseh Food Centre in Jalan Besar. The signature pork trotter jelly requires boiling trotters for seven to eight hours under constant stirring, followed by half a day of refrigeration to set the gelatin naturally.

Cleaning and preparing additional braised items takes several more hours each morning. Lao Liang sells individual portions of pork trotter jelly from S$5 ($3.91) and Teochew kway chap sets for S$4, price points that leave little margin against the intense labor required.

The closure reflects an ongoing attrition across Singapore’s hawker and casual dining footprint, where multi-decade operators face generational handover bottlenecks. Younger workers consistently reject arduous kitchen prep shifts that deliver low gross yields, leaving aging founders with liquidation as their sole exit strategy.

For food court managers and government landlords, these exits accelerate the transition toward centralized prep kitchens and standardized fast-casual menus. Heritage recipes that depend entirely on manual butchery and extended braising cycles are disappearing from municipal centres as private operators find them commercially unviable at entry-level hawker prices.

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