Every business has someone who does the heavy lifting.
Ours has four wheels and fits in a standard parking space.
Shiokee is the latest and youngest member of our team.
Shiokee is our Kei food truck.
Shiokee bears the colours of the Singapore flag, is designed and built in Auckland,
and is the first and only of her kind in New Zealand.
Why "Little Red Dot"?
Shiokee's Chinese name 小红点 (pinyin: xiǎo hóng diǎn) means little red dot — what Singaporeans call Singapore.
It started as an insult. In 1998, a neighbouring country's president pointed at a map and dismissed Singapore as nothing more than a little red dot. Singaporeans took the phrase, kept it, and made it a point of pride.
It fit her perfectly. She's red. She carries the colours of the Singapore flag. And she's very, very small.
But, as Singaporeans know, small has never been the same thing as insignificant.
Tiny and mighty
Shiokee is a Kei truck — a Japanese class of vehicle built to strict size limits. She's shorter than most SUVs, lighter than a family car and she'll fit where a trailer can't.
Inside, she's a working kitchen. She can turn a car park into a hawker stall in fifteen minutes. Shiokee is a "she" because she carries everything — all the load— including our family's hopes and dreams.
And like the country she is inspired by: not big, but punching well above her weight.
What she carries
Hawker food in Singapore is cooked in tiny stalls by people — migrants and their descendents— who have made the same dish for decades. It's not fine dining. It's also the food a whole country grew up on.
That tradition doesn't transplant easily. There are no hawker centres in Auckland.
So we built the closest thing we could: one stall, on wheels, doing them dishes proudly.
Shiokee is how we carry that here.
Same food, same care, different country.
Who built her
Shiokee was designed and built right here in Auckland by Ohkeidokie —because we couldn't find anyone in New Zealand who'd done this before, so we worked it out ourselves.
Follow @ohkei_dokie on Instagram to learn more or email ohkeidokie@gmail.com to discuss your dream build.