Yum Cha’s mahjong Fridays draw bookings as Singapore restaurants seek repeat diners

Yum Cha’s Friday afternoon mahjong sessions at its Chinatown restaurant in Singapore are fully booked for October, executive director Melody Tan told Channel NewsAsia in a report published on 8 October. The restaurant introduced the sessions in August to draw customers during quieter hours and encourage repeat visits, at a time when Singapore’s food and beverage sales remain below their year-earlier level.

The 26-year-old dim sum restaurant runs Mahjong Social Fridays from 2pm to 6pm. Tan said bookings already extend into November. That response indicates interest in the sessions, although the published account gives no attendance total or sales figures that would show what the initiative has earned.

Why Yum Cha added mahjong to Friday afternoons

Tan described the idea to Channel NewsAsia as an experiment: she wanted to see who would play mahjong and come for high tea. The timing puts an activity into the restaurant’s quieter period after lunch, when filling seats could matter more than adding customers at an already busy mealtime.

She also hopes to bring younger customers into the restaurant. Tan said some young people are curious about a game they know through relatives or friends but do not know where to learn it. Channel NewsAsia reported a mix of students, freelancers and retirees at the sessions, including people playing mahjong for the first time. For the restaurant, the activity is intended to give those customers a reason to spend time there together.

The costs and sales figures behind the experiment

The business pressures Tan described are specific to Yum Cha. She told Channel NewsAsia that its rental, manpower and ingredient costs had risen by about 20% from a year earlier, while footfall was down about 20% since 2024. These are the executive director’s reported estimates, not independently audited figures. The two percentages also measure different things over different periods, so they should not be read as a calculation of the restaurant’s profit.

The latest monthly figures listed by the Singapore Department of Statistics provide a wider view. Food and beverage services sales fell 1.6% in August compared with August 2025. The Restaurant Association of Singapore said the decline had narrowed from 1.9% in July, but August was still the third consecutive month with sales below the corresponding month a year earlier.

How Singapore’s dining sectors differed in August

The national picture was uneven across types of food business, according to the Restaurant Association of Singapore’s account of the official release. Restaurant sales fell 2.1% from a year earlier, even as they rose 2.5% from July on a seasonally adjusted basis. Cafe sales were down 5.3% year on year, while sales at food courts and other eating places were down 4.8%. Those figures provide context for the pressure on places serving diners, but they do not measure Yum Cha’s results.

Other segments moved in the opposite direction. The association reported that fast-food outlet sales rose 7.8% year on year in August and food caterers’ sales rose 2.9%. Online orders accounted for 20.6% of food and beverage sales that month, compared with 20.9% in July, according to the association. The differences make it difficult to describe one experience-led promotion as a response that would suit the entire sector.

What the bookings have yet to show

For now, the confirmed near-term development is that Yum Cha’s October sessions are booked out and reservations reach into November. Channel NewsAsia’s report did not give the number of tables, participants or bookings, nor did it report revenue, repeat-visit rates or a plan for the sessions after November. Those missing measures matter to the question Tan is trying to answer: whether an afternoon game can turn initial curiosity into sustained custom.