Video-led content and creator collaborations that put a third-generation zi char kitchen in front of 800K–1.5M people.

Keng Eng Kee — KEK to most of the people who eat there — has been cooking zi char since 1975, from a hawker stall at the old Havelock Road hawker centre to the corner unit at Alexandra Village it is known for today, now run by the third generation of the family. A reputation like that is built on repeat diners and word of mouth, and it holds beautifully among people who already know the name. The problem is where the next table comes from. Deciding what to eat has moved onto short-form video, and a wok-fired kitchen has to compete there against a feed of new openings, hawker discoveries and full-time food creators posting daily. Turning up in that feed with any consistency means a publishing rhythm designed for vertical video — and that is difficult to sustain from behind a service line already running at capacity.

Put the restaurant in front of a materially larger audience on Meta and TikTok, and build a dependable pipeline of video-led content around the food and the way it is cooked. Reach on its own was not the point: the aim was content people would save to eat later and send to the friend they would come with. That made saves and engagement rate the quality check on the reach number, and success was measured in reach, video views and engagement — awareness metrics — rather than in orders or bookings attributed to the work.

We took over day-to-day social media management — the content calendar, the posting cadence and the community replies across the brand’s channels — so publishing no longer depended on someone finding a spare hour between services. Our team produced original video, photography and design built around what actually happens in the kitchen: the wok, the flame, the plating and the dishes people come back for, shot vertical-first for the platforms the content was made to live on. Pieces that earned attention organically were then amplified with awareness campaigns across Meta and TikTok, optimised toward cost-efficient reach and video completion rather than impressions for their own sake. Influencer and creator collaborations carried the restaurant into food audiences it did not already own, in a voice those audiences already trust. Each month the production plan and media budget were shifted toward the hooks, formats and dishes the numbers favoured, so the content compounded instead of resetting.

Over five to six months the work reached 800K–1.5M people and generated 1.5–2.5M video views, with engagement holding above 2.5% and a high save rate — the signal that the content was not just watched, but kept for the next meal out.

See the rest of our client work on the case studies page.