SINGAPORE – At 22, Mr Fu Yong Hong opened a vegetarian stall – despite hating vegetables. Today, he helms Singapore’s biggest plant-based restaurant chain.

Now 36, he is chief executive of Greendot Group, which pulls in an annual turnover of $21 million from 15 outlets, including Lotus Vegetarian Restaurant. The group will open a 16th eatery – a Greendot outlet – at The Star Vista in July.

Mr Fu co-founded the business in 2011 with his secondary school friend, Mr Justin Chou. At the time, Mr Fu was in his second year studying business at National University of Singapore and still a staunch meat lover.

Mr Chou, a lifelong vegetarian who struggled to find wallet-friendly meatless meals as a student, proposed they tap his family’s resources and set up a vegetarian food stall. His mother, Ms Rebecca Lee, 64, ran Lotus Vegetarian Restaurant and his family owns a vegetarian food manufacturing facility in Johor.

Though he hated greens, Mr Fu was eager to test his classroom theories on real-world business. He agreed to the partnership – on one condition: “We shouldn’t limit ourselves to just vegetarian customers. I want to target non-vegetarians too.”

Hands-on experience

To win their parents’ support and learn the ropes, the two worked part-time for a year in 2010 at Lotus Vegetarian Restaurant, which opened in 2003.

They started with the basics – slicing vegetables and packing dishes – then moved on to running live stations for vegetarian laksa and chicken rice, and setting up buffet lines for catering orders.

It was Ms Lee who told them to start small: one school canteen stall. She developed a pared-down menu of restaurant-quality dishes for a canteen setting.

In December 2011, the pair pooled $20,000 with a third partner to launch Greendot at the canteen of Temasek Polytechnic’s School of Design. The two of them cooked everything, using ingredients and sauces from the vegetarian food factory Mr Chou’s family owned. They hired a full-time cook when they opened a third outlet.

At the time, Mr Fu did not eat vegetables. “If a burger had lettuce, I would remove it. If noodles had bean sprouts, I would pick them out.”

The first three months were rough. “The neighbouring stalls told me the brinjal I cooked was too hard and tasted raw,” he says. “I tasted it, and threw it out immediately. I felt very embarrassed.”

But he focused on sharpening his cooking sk...