Allen Lo grew up in the back of his family's restaurant in Kedah, Malaysia - seven days a week, twelve hours a day, a boy prepping vegetables and frying spring rolls and fried rice, often spending more time there than at his own house. Out on the streets, his relatives were actual hawkers: people who travel around selling food, calling it out as they go.
Then, in Orlando, he ran his own mortgage company for nearly a decade.
In 2010 he asked three friends to open a restaurant with him. Kaleb Harrell's first answer: "Absolutely not. No way. What are you, crazy? I don't want to start a restaurant, No way, man." All three came in anyway. In 2011, with no money, the four built the first Hawkers themselves on Mills Avenue in Orlando - Harrell, a finance graduate: "The next thing I knew I was learning to cook on the wok and running the line." Lo, on that first year: "We enjoyed it the best we could. We'd work through our day, we'd clean the kitchen, and we'd crack a couple of beers at the end and talk about, 'Wow, what just happened?'"
Since September 2023 those same recipes - passed down through generations of Lo's family, many still sold from hawker stalls on the streets of Asia today, including a curry dipping sauce he guards closely - have been on the table at Hawkers on Belt Line Road, on tables and benches the company's own woodshop built by hand. Go with friends. Order whatever you're feeling tonight, stall by stall. Lo already said how: "have some good drinks, have some good food… have a good two three hours with friends."