Our Origin Story: How Let's Meat Started in Tanjung Bungah
Let's Meat didn't start as a restaurant plan — it started with a hummingbird cake in a tiny third-floor café, a rock-climbing dream that fell through, and a couple who accidentally became café operators. In 2016, Diana, Ben, and Joyce took a leap on a small shop at 18 Lebuh Lembah Permai 4, Tanjung Bungah — with no launch strategy, no manual, and a menu Ben got the night before opening. They closed day one with RM350 in sales. That "hawker budget, restaurant dreams" energy is still what runs the kitchen today.
Every neighbourhood diner in Tanjung Bungah has an origin story. Most of them are tidier than ours. Here's how a hummingbird cake, a failed rock-climbing business, and a very small budget turned into the family-run American restaurant Penang locals now call Let's Meat.
The Hummingbird Cake That Started It All
I had set out to start a rock-climbing business with absolutely no clue what I was doing. Like any responsible, keen learner with a dream and a dangerous amount of confidence, I went looking for help.
A friend of mine was a business coach whose office was on the third floor of Vantage. We made an appointment and went to see her. Her office was cosy, with that quaint industrial charm that was extremely popular in the 2010s. You know the look: exposed brick, warm lighting and furniture that appeared to have been rescued from a factory.
The conversation was encouraging. But what really caught our attention was the coffee and the surprisingly good hummingbird cake being served from a tiny café inside her studio office. We asked my coach about the cake, and she introduced us to the operator of the little café: her younger sister, Joyce.
Joyce had spent 11 years in Kentucky and had become fed up with cakes being light, airy and spongy. So she decided to make them herself. With real butter. And LOTS of it.
Diana and Joyce immediately hit it off. Between their shared American experiences and their mutual belief that most things could be improved by adding an irresponsible amount of butter, the two quickly became inseparable.
Becoming a Barista (Unwillingly..)
While I was off trying to make my rock-climbing dreams come true, Diana left her teaching job and started helping Joyce with the café. Then the first version of my climbing dream evaporated like a snowball in the searing desert of my inexperience and cluelessness.
Fortunately, I was immediately presented with another exciting career opportunity: becoming a barista for my wife and her new best friend. For anyone curious about what it is like working for your wife and her best friend, buy me a drink sometime and we can have that conversation in private.
Together, we managed to bring the little café to roughly breakeven — which, at the time, felt like tremendous success. We tried new menu items. We systemised cooking methods and stock management. We learned how to hire people, train staff and keep a food business running without everything catching fire. Most days, anyway.
It was a season of learning, experimenting and occasionally pretending we knew exactly what we were doing. We had no idea then, but that tiny café would become the on-ramp to Let's Meat — and eventually much more.
We Are Not Getting Rich Up Here
In 2016, after studying the numbers, we came to a difficult and "highly sophisticated" business conclusion: a small, obscure café on the third floor of Vantage, hidden inside somebody else's office, was probably not going to make us rich.
Or sustainable..... Or particularly easy to find.....
So we started asking questions:
Who were we?
Who could we serve well?
What did people actually want?
And, perhaps most importantly, what could this new dad — who learned to cook by surviving college on a meager food budget, and who sometimes made breakfast for his family and friends — and a retired F&B graphic designer — who bakes a killer hummingbird cake and really loves butter — realistically cook? We studied the market, spoke to people, and considered our options.
Hawker Budget, Restaurant Dreams
Eventually, we landed on a simple idea: a breakfast place. And we found a shop at 18 Lebuh Lembah Permai 4, right here in Tanjung Bungah. I remember looking at the budget. It was impossibly small. We had enough money to open a hawker stall, perhaps. We certainly did not have enough to open a restaurant. But fortune favours the bold, AM I RIGHT? Or so I've heard. But anyway.. We signed the rental agreement. We were due to open in one month.
YouTube University
The only way it was going to happen was if we did the renovations ourselves.
At the time, I had very little building experience. I borrowed tools from friends and invested nearly all of my toilet time watching YouTube construction videos until I had a decent idea of what to do. Or, more accurately, until I had enough confidence to become dangerous.
The Night-Before Curveball
Diana and Joyce had prepared the menu and bought the ingredients. I was finishing the last few details on Eli's little playhouse when someone handed me the menu and said:
"Here's the menu. Make sure you know how to cook everything on it tomorrow. We'll figure out how to run the front." A flawless operational plan. No notes.
Home-Grown Design on a Zero-Dollar Budget
Diana and Joyce had a keen eye for design and an uncanny ability to make a space feel warm and homely — even with almost no money and a severely underqualified carpenter (who also did the electrical work).
Looking back, I am genuinely not sure how we pulled it off. But we did. We finished the space the day before opening.
No Strategy, No Manual, Just Day One
And that is how Let's Meat began. On our first day, we opened from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. We closed with RM350 in sales. At the front was a Diana — pregnant with no. 2 — figuring things out as she went, while carrying our newborn son, Eli, at her waist. In the kitchen was a YouTube-trained carpenter, and a fussy, butter-loving ex-graphic designer, pretending to be cooks. And alongside us were two staff members helping to manage the chaos.
There were no consultants. No launch strategy. No beautifully organised operations manual. Just six people, one and a half babies, a menu I had received the day before and the hope that nobody ordered anything too complicated. It was messy. It was exhausting. It was slightly ridiculous. But we had opened. And somehow, that strange little breakfast place became Let's Meat.
That same "figure it out together" spirit is still what you'll find when you walk in the door today — same address, same neighbourhood, a lot more practice. Come meet the family behind it — reserve your table in Tanjung Bungah on WhatsApp, or order via Grab and taste it at home.
