From 100kg to 77kg: How Willow’s chef Nicolas Tam rebuilt his health — one workout at a time

Singapore’s F&B scene sells indulgence for a living, and it burns through the people who make it through late nights, short sleeps, and the odd bottle shared with guests who won’t drink alone. For years, surviving the late-night shifts mattered more than shaping the body that carried it, but that’s changing.

A handful of chefs and bartenders now treat fitness as non-negotiable, building the discipline that gets them through a long service and back intact the next day. This isn’t an after-photo story. It’s what happens when people whose craft runs on excess build some control back into it — each for a different reason, and none for the mirror. In this three-part special, The Peak features the fitness journeys of two chefs and one mixologist.

The trigger wasn’t sheer vanity, but an insurance form. Last year, Nicolas Tam sat through a run-of-the-mill health check-up that Singapore’s insurers require past a certain age, and found himself staring down the barrel of a terrifying medical report. 

Weighing in at 100kg, battling a fatty liver, and shadowed by a family history of diabetes and heart disease, the prognosis was a massive wake-up call. “Every day I was receiving deliveries in the early morning, preparing ingredients through the afternoon, and cooking straight through dinner service,” says Tam. “Then, it was drinks with regulars who wouldn’t have a nightcap alone, on repeat every night, running on poor sleep.” 

Four years of hands-on service at his one-Michelin-starred contemporary Asian restaurant had taken a toll without him noticing.

Tam knew the fix had to be deliberate. The 36-year-old hired a personal trainer, brought his childhood best friend along for accountability, and committed to gym training four days a week. He candidly admits to nearly fainting during his very first workout, struggling to breathe for almost half an hour.

For Tam, a shift in mindset was more apparent than his physical capabilities. “Everyone has the same 24 hours,” he says, and hitting the gym forced him to admit that “I don’t have time” usually meant “I haven’t made it a priority”. 

His progress wasn’t linear; it plateaued in the middle: weeks where nothing on the scale moved despite the effort, and peers needled him about whether the gym visits were still happening. But he pushed through with a mantra from his trainer: Never tell yourself you can’t before you’ve tried.

Only after roughly a year did the transformation start to kick in. Tam, who weighs 77kg these days, is clear that losing 20kg of fat wasn’t instant — he jokes that he is “not on Ozempic” — but the compounding effect of getting leaner and stronger started to bear fruit. 

Now, Tam trains three mornings a week on his own, doing 90 minutes of heavy lifting and cardio before starting service. He’s since become smarter with his food choices, weighing whether it’s worth it rather than avoiding it outright, and having no more than two drinks on nights he has to entertain.

“It was never about deprivation,” he says. “I still eat my carbs, and I taste everything that leaves my kitchen, because there are still standards to uphold.”

After years of controlling every plate at Willow, Tam’s finally learned to delegate to a team he spent years building. It shows in how the kitchen runs day to day, but it speaks volumes in his current menu — a more personal, mature direction he describes as stepping back to ask what he actually wants to say with his food, where intricate bites are shaped by his expanded culinary cache of personal memories.

Willow’s cuisine showcases Tam’s amplified repertoire of Chinese-Japanese flavours and his Southeast Asian roots.

Ask what’s next, and he doesn’t reach for a dramatic podium finish. Instead, he wants longevity — to stand and keep pace with cooks half his age as Willow’s parent company, Mission Group, grows into one of Singapore’s largest F&B operations and demands more of him.