Manjinder Siingh opened Ambar Surrey Restaurant in 2021 after more than two decades working across India, Portugal, and Canada. The restaurant reflects a career built through ownership, setback, and continued adaptation.
Three Countries, One Kitchen: How Manjinder Siingh Built Ambar Surrey
The plates at Ambar Surrey Restaurant carry a geography that goes well beyond Surrey, British Columbia. Behind the kitchen is a man who worked his way through the hospitality industry across three countries before planting something permanent.
Manjinder Siingh does not run the kind of restaurant that was handed to him. He built it slowly, through a culinary education in the foothills of the Himalayas, a decade of restaurant ownership in southern Europe, and several years adjusting to the rhythms of Canadian food culture. Surrey, in the end, was not an accident. It was the place where all of it could finally come together.
Starting in the North of India
Siingh was born and raised in Punjab, a state whose food culture has traveled further and influenced more kitchens around the world than perhaps any other regional cuisine in the subcontinent. Dal makhani. Butter chicken. Sarson da saag. These are not just dishes. They are a culinary language, developed over generations in the agricultural heartland of northern India, and Siingh grew up speaking it natively.
He formalized that knowledge through a Bachelor’s degree in Hotel Management and Culinary Arts at Uttarakhand University in India. The program gave him the technical foundation for what would become a career defined less by a single institution than by the accumulation of experience across many of them.
His first major professional role was at Crowne Plaza in New Delhi, a property that operates at the higher end of the hotel and resort market. Working in that environment meant learning pace, standard, and the discipline that comes with feeding a demanding clientele at volume.
Seven Years in Portugal
The path that followed was not a conventional one. Siingh moved to Portugal and opened Taste of India, an Indian restaurant in which he served as both Master Head Chef and Owner. He ran it for seven years.
Seven years is a long time in the restaurant industry. Long enough to understand your customers, build supplier relationships, adjust your menu through trial and feedback, and develop the management instincts that no culinary degree teaches you. For Siingh, it was also the period in which he learned what restaurant ownership actually looks like when the initial excitement has passed and the work of running a business takes over.
What followed was his second attempt at ownership in Portugal. Safira Pub and Bar was a different kind of venture, a pub rather than a restaurant, and it lasted three years. Siingh describes what happened there as a failure. The willingness to name it that plainly, and to cite it as something he learned from rather than something he overcame dramatically, says something about how he approaches his own career. The business did not work. He took what it taught him and moved on.
Arriving in Canada
Siingh relocated to Canada in April 2017. Rather than moving immediately into ownership again, he spent approximately three and a half years working at Jagga Sweets, a food service business that gave him time to understand the Canadian market, its suppliers, its customers, and the regulatory environment that governs food businesses in British Columbia.
This period of employment after years of ownership is worth noting. For someone with Siingh’s level of experience, stepping back into a staff role represents a deliberate form of patience. He was not starting over. He was gathering the local knowledge needed to do the next thing properly.
Ambar Surrey Restaurant
In February 2021, Siingh opened Ambar Surrey Restaurant in Surrey, British Columbia. The timing placed the launch in the middle of a period that was difficult for the restaurant industry across the board. Opening in 2021 meant navigating the residual disruptions of a pandemic-affected supply chain, shifting consumer habits around dining in and out, and competing for attention in a Metro Vancouver food market that is both densely populated and highly competitive.
Ambar focuses on Punjabi cuisine, the food tradition Siingh grew up with and has worked with throughout his career. In Surrey, that choice has a particular resonance. Surrey has one of the largest South Asian populations of any city in Canada, and the demand for authentic Punjabi food is real and sustained.
The restaurant received the Best Restaurant designation from the City of White Rock Chambers, an external recognition that arrived after opening and reflects the reception the restaurant has built in the community.
The Work of Staying Open to What Comes Next
Siingh describes his approach in terms that are deceptively simple. Continuous. Open to new changes and possibilities. These are not phrases that generate headlines. But they reflect something real about what it takes to build and maintain a restaurant business over the long arc of a career.
The restaurant industry tends to produce either quick exits or decades-long operators. Siingh is clearly in the second category. His career has moved through two continents, multiple ownership structures, at least one significant setback, and the process of resetting in a new country in his thirties. Each stage produced something that fed into the next.
Ambar Surrey Restaurant is, at this point, the clearest expression of where that progression has arrived. A focused concept, in a market with genuine demand, run by someone who has been in the business long enough to know what he is doing and why.
What Comes Next For Manjinder Siingh
Manjinder Siingh continues to operate Ambar Surrey Restaurant in Surrey, British Columbia. The restaurant serves Punjabi cuisine and can be found at ambarsurrey.com. His interests outside the kitchen include sports and events promotion and fundraising for community causes.
