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Ong Lai Kopitiam: The Malaysian Kopitiam Robert Ngo Rebuilt in Canary Wharf, From the Green Tiles to His Mum's Wontons
Every wonton served at Ong Lai Kopitiam is wrapped by Robert Ngo's mum. Not just her recipe, though it is that too. She comes in and folds them herself, one by one, for her son's first restaurant.
It's the business she and her husband spent a working life trying to keep him out of.
From his dad's takeaways to a £5,000 market stall
Robert was born in Hackney and raised in Leyton. His dad opened his first restaurant when he was five and at his peak ran four takeaways across East London, so Robert grew up doing weekends in the kitchen and then waiting tables out front. The financial crisis took the shops. By the time he was choosing a career, the family trade wasn't an inheritance waiting for him. It had already been lost once.
He chose architecture, and worked as a designer and then a CAD technician for about ten years. His parents were pleased. Somewhere in those ten years it stopped working, and he describes the end of it without softening it:
I was really stressed at work. I felt really unmotivated. And my wife was on the receiving end of this negativity, this anger that was inside me about, what am I doing with my life?
What he did in the evenings was cook. His wife Mel is from Kelantan, and one of the dishes he kept making for her was nasi kerabu, the blue rice dish from her state. She told him to take it to the street and find out whether there was a business in it. He started Eat Lah with £5,000, traded one day a week alongside the job, and handed in his notice two months later. His parents thought he'd lost his mind.
Then came the part that doesn't usually get told in food features. Eat Lah's first fixed site, at Boxpark in Croydon, flopped. The second, at Canteen in Design District, did worse. Two failures in, he could finally name what he wanted: not a food court pitch, but a room of his own, his fit-out, his music, his service. By the time he went after it, he and Mel were expecting their second child.
What makes a kopitiam a kopitiam
Ong Lai opened at Wood Wharf in 2025. Ong is prosperity, lai is coming my way. It also sounds like the Hokkien word for pineapple, which is why there's a pineapple in the logo.
He deliberately didn't extend the Eat Lah identity into it, building the brand from the ground up with a Malaysian agency that understood kopitiam culture. The room is a reconstruction rather than an interpretation: the green off the old Nanyang shops, the tiles, the tables, the chairs, and a playlist of the Mandopop he and Mel grew up on. The coffee took a trip. Kopitiam coffee is robusta, roasted dark and pulled long, so they went back to Malaysia, found a roaster, and sat down with kopitiam baristas to learn how it's actually done before bringing it back.
Ong Lai is where we take the essence of a Malaysian kopitiam and bring it to London, with the nostalgia and memories of not only Malaysians, but people who visited Malaysia before.
That last clause is the whole design brief. The memories being served aren't only his, and some of them aren't his at all.
Nasi kerabu, and two family recipes
Malaysian and Singaporean restaurants here tend to lead with nasi lemak or nasi goreng. Ong Lai serves neither, on purpose. The signature is nasi kerabu: rice coloured with butterfly pea flower, cooked with lemongrass, galangal, ginger and kaffir lime leaves, served with cabbage, cucumber, toasted coconut, bunga kantan and budu. It comes from Kelantan, which means the signature dish of Robert's restaurant is his wife's hometown food, and she's the person who told him to sell it in the first place.
His own favourite is the kon lo mee, a kopitiam staple he couldn't find anywhere in London. The char siu on it is his dad's recipe. The wontons are his mum's, and she doesn't just supply the recipe.
Because this is my first restaurant, my mum is still helping us wrap our wontons. Each and every wonton is wrapped by mum. That's their love language.
The business that his parents wanted him out of
Robert is careful about how he describes his parents on this. They worked the hours they worked so their children would have the education and the life that meant they wouldn't end up in food and beverage. Not because they were ashamed of the trade, but because of how it's seen, particularly for his generation.
No matter how low of a status people think the food and beverage business is, these were the businesses that raised us.
He thinks it falls to his generation to pick it back up, and he isn't the only one doing it.
What it feels like to eat there
I spent a long time talking to Robert and could have kept going. The thing I wasn't expecting was the room. Every member of staff who came past the table talked to us like family rather than like service, and you look up halfway through a meal and realise you've relaxed in a way you don't usually relax in a restaurant. It feels like somewhere you've been coming for years rather than somewhere you found last month. That's what will bring me back, more than any single dish.
Robert would tell you that's the entire point, and the one part of a restaurant nobody can copy off you:
It's the whole experience of escaping from normal daily life, and just relaxing and having a good time in the hour and a half that they're here.
His parents have eaten there. He says they haven't said anything about it.
I know that they're very proud. They're also very worried. Because they want me to have stability, and for them, stability is a well-paid job.
Have you been to Ong Lai Kopitiam, or is it on your list? Tell us below 👇
🎥 Check our interview video below
Find Them
📍 Unit 10, 8 Harbord Square, Wood Wharf, Canary Wharf, London E14 9TH
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