He started out as a pub-crawler who got involved in the bar business by chance, opening the most innovative bars and clubs in Singapore.
Now the 39-year-old "King of Clubs" is set to strut his stuff with his very own "Project Runway" in Shanghai.
Simon Lim, managing director of Singapore-based Wong San's Group, will open the world's first Elite Bar, named after prestigious New York-based model house Elite Model Group, which counts past and present models like Cindy Crawford, Tyra Banks and Alessandra Ambrosio among its clients.
Slated to be the latest haunt in town from next Wednesday, the Elite Bar boasts 1,400 square meters spread over two levels. It is housed in The New Factories, touted to be the next Xintiandi on Xikang Road in Jing'an District.
And true to its model-esque origin, the bar is embedded with a 12-meter runway that will ascend from the dance floor to hold a sumptuous spread of runway shows in the pipeline.
The New Factories, or Tong Le Fang in Mandarin, is a 20,000 square meter, 200 million yuan (US$25 million) project consisting of old Shanghai factories built in 1928 that will be transformed into an entertainment and lifestyle cluster.
Shanghai has long been a lucrative entertainment and lifestyle market which sees loads of clubs and bars popping up and fizzling out by the dozens, but Lim would not talk about the competition.
"We certainly want to seek our own place in the sun. The way we do it is offering something different from what the other clubs and bars offer. We are adding on to the whole mosaic rather than to take business away from another," Lim said.
Beautiful people, or rather the dream of becoming beautiful, will be its biggest draw. Apart from being able to see and to be seen at the "unofficial home to models," fun-seekers and model wanabes could look forward to be hunted by model scouts and traveling photographers.
"The Elite experience is for everyone, not just for models on the runway. The Elite Bar is an extension of that goal," said Lim. "Prices at the bar will be reasonable and competitive."
And do not expect to be served by waiters and waitresses resembling Greek gods and goddesses.
"Grooming, posture and personality play the biggest part in our staff. They don't necessarily have to be models," said Lim.
Making his favorite pastime a career was an unexpected turn of events for the marketing and finance graduate who worked as a pump attendant at his father's petrol station.
Back in the early 1990s, the fresh graduate of the University of Texas would go pubbing at Mohamed Sultan Road, a booming bar street in Singapore then, after work every night.
He was eventually roped in by a bar owner to look after the latter's business and has never looked back since.
Over the last 12 years, Wong San's Group has grown from a single pub in 1994 with revenues of S$960,000 (US$61,146) to over S$10 million today, and has expanded its services to consultancy for other clubs and bars in Asia.
A forerunner in terms of innovation in the clubbing scene in Singapore, Lim has seen his fair share of successes and failures, such as Two Rooms, an oxygen bar that saw its novelty dissipate as fast as the oxygen in the machines that produced it.
Thumper Bar, his most recent addition in Singapore, was named Nightspot of the Year last year in the city-state. The bar uses thumbprint recognition to identify its members and let them order and pay for bills using their prints.
"The biggest misconception people have about the business is that you don't do anything in the day and all you do is just drink," Lim said.
It is serious business beneath all that glamour.
"You need to have a business plan. You need to have a proper concept. You have to deal with your suppliers and all the stakeholders, particularly the government. The bar business has to do with a lot of perceptions. You need to have a well-developed marketing machinery. In this business, your customers become your products if you're successful."
For his 10 million yuan investment debut in China, Lim took one and half years jetting in and out of Shanghai to find the perfect match, from locations, landlords to angel investors.
Having most of his portfolio centered in Singapore, Lim confessed it is "a walk in the dark" for his latest venture on the mainland.
Yet he is unfazed, pointing out that he does not frequent too many bars so as to keep his originality.
"The best bars are often not the most famous ones. They are the ones that give people big smiles. I get a lot of inspiration from unknown bars, not the big-names."
His biggest worry?
"That we are not able to handle all the crowds that come to party with us," Lim said half jokingly.
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