Yishun couple turn five-room HDB flat into private dining pizzeria PXZA

Married couple David Shen and Sheralyn Tay, both 45, run a home-based private dining business called PXZA from their five-room HDB flat in Yishun, serving 12-course Neapolitan-style pizza dinners to paying guests. They juggle the venture with their day jobs, handling all preparation and hosting them

SINGAPORE: A married couple are busy preparing a pizza dinner for eight guests in their Yishun flat when they receive a last-minute request: Can they accommodate a ninth guest? “Easy-peasy,” the husband says. The look on his wife’s face says otherwise. “No, it’s not, okay? We have to move a lot of things,” Sheralyn Tay counters before bustling to reset the table.

This is not just another day in married life, however, for the couple, both 45. For two years, they have welcomed paying guests to their five-room flat through their private dining business, PXZA, which they juggle with their day jobs. And it takes more than pizza-making skills to pull off these dinners. With home-based business regulations preventing them from hiring external help, the couple must handle everything themselves — with limited kitchen space and limited time between each course they serve.

Shen and Tay’s home-based pizzeria has its origins in the pandemic, when Shen was craving Neapolitan-style pizza — which is best eaten fresh from the oven and not as a takeaway, the couple agree. They borrowed an oven from a friend and tried making it themselves. Those early attempts were “quite terrible”, Tay recalls. But they persisted, testing their dough about three times a week, with friends sampling the results. Eventually, one friend wanted to bring along his family for a meal, offering to pay and suggesting that the couple host private dinners. Thus they created PXZA, with omakase-style dining and menus featuring the freshest ingredients they can source.

“I’m obsessed with pizza. I’m obsessed with the dough,” says Shen, a marketing consultant, who sees their private dinner parties as a way of building a community of “pizza fanatics”. Tay, who runs an editorial consultancy and co-owns a fashion brand, has always found joy in cooking and in hosting others. “I love feeding people, and David loves making pizza,” she says. To ease the workload on dinner days, which are Fridays and Saturdays, they get their toppings and other ingredients ready in advance.

PXZA’s ingredients occupy about 60 per cent of the couple’s fridge and freezer, leaving Tay to play what she calls “fridge Jenga” to fit in their own meals too. Kitchen counter space is also limited. Shen sometimes moves his dough to the air-conditioned living room to keep it cool and free up space, while using ice during mixing to prevent it rising too quickly in Singapore’s heat and humidity. The couple have divided the work according to their strengths. Shen makes the dough and bakes the pizzas. Tay, meanwhile, brings structure and consistency to his ideas by managing inventory, the planning and written recipes. She also takes charge of the plating and hosting.

Given the effort involved, with hours spent preparing and hosting each dinner, and the quality of the ingredients, Tay thinks the S$100 they charge per person is reasonable. PXZA is not their main income source, and they have no plans to change that. “Revenue isn’t really the most important thing for us,” says Shen. He calls their home-based business “a hobby that funds itself”, whose earnings pay for better ingredients, kitchen equipment and other “toys” they might not otherwise buy. They rely on word of mouth for custom rather than actively marketing the venture.

Opening their own restaurant, meanwhile, is not on the cards for now. Shen prefers to focus on making “great pizzas” rather than managing profit and loss, while Tay values the freedom from overheads, staff wages and other business obligations. “It’d be nice to continue to welcome people into our home and feed them,” she says. “There’s nothing better than making people feel happy.”