Long before Ernst Huber ever heard of a tropical island called Singapore, there was Sellenbüren, the small Swiss village where he grew up and where his parents ran a restaurant. “I used to do my homework there, and always heard the latest village news,” he remembers, eyes twinkling. “In school, I became the person with information for my friends, because I was always the one in the know about things that people were discussing.” 

Good gossip aside, it was an independent childhood. He helped out in the restaurant, washing dishes and learning how to cook from his mother. In the mornings, he and his sister made their own breakfast while their parents slept in, as they kept late hours at the restaurant. By the time he was a teenager, Ernst was studying butchery, cooking and restaurant management in Zurich. At the age of 21, he landed his first job as a cook at a Hilton hotel in Malta. 

“First, I said yes,” he explains with a laugh. “Then I asked: Where’s that?” The Mediterranean archipelago turned out to be the first stop in his globetrotting adventures, which brought him to other Hilton hotels in Iran and Kenya. The most valuable lesson he learned from these travels? “You have to adjust wherever you go, because people won’t adjust to you. You have to work hard, be honest, and treat everyone equally. That’s what I have tried to teach my children. Every person is a person, whatever colour they may be. We had cooks in Nairobi who collected their salaries with their thumbprints because they never went to school. But that didn’t mean they were stupid. I never had a problem in all the places I worked, because if you respect people the way they are, they’ll respect you. It’s as simple as that.” 

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Andre, the younger of his two sons, agrees that treating everyone with respect was a value that his parents drummed into him and his brother Ryan. “From a young age, we were taught that everyone is equal. Our dad would always tell us that in Switzerland, people don’t look at what a person does, but how well he did his job, and more respect would be paid to a cleaner who did a good job than a doctor who did a bad job.” 

The brothers experienced Ernst’s commitment to equality first-hand when they started working under him at Swiss Butchery, which their father helped to start in 1994. “I told them, you are equal to everyone else, you don’t get special treatment,” says Ernst. “When you have gone through your whole life as an employee, you know how people think and how they talk. The moment you show favouritism, you’ll get problems with the staff. So it’s very important that everybody is on the same level.”

Love in the Lion City

Ernst never expected to end up in Singapore. In 1973, he went home to Switzerland after finishing his stint in Kenya, and had already accepted a posting to Hilton Bogotá in Colombia when an offer for a Singapore posting popped up unexpectedly. “When I was in Kenya, I’d read a half page article in a magazine about Singapore, and everything sounded so exotic. That article was still in my head when this offer came up.” And so it was decided: bye-bye Bogotá, hello Singapore. It was a decision that changed his life. At Hilton Singapore, Ernst met his future wife, Dorothy, who manned the front desk as an information clerk. 

“He would come to talk to me because he had to send letters back to Switzerland, and that was my job,” says Dorothy. “He was very cute, always making jokes. I felt at ease with him. I was very shy, and I felt more relaxed around him since he was humorous.” They started dating, and she can still remember going to her first-ever disco with him at the now defunct Cockpit Hotel. She might have seen herself as shy, but Dorothy wasn’t a total shrinking violet. “In the past, I was very havoc. I wore a lot of miniskirts,” she shares. Ernst wasn’t her first boyfriend, and in fact, “I was surprised he liked me. He was very different, very open-minded.” They got married in 1976. 

The affable Dorothy prefers to let her husband take the lead, and says she helped to instil honesty and discipline in her two sons because these were very important values to Ernst. “I was quite strict,” the patriarch admits. “They often complained, but I said, wait till you’re older, you’ll realise how good it was that you had a strict upbringing.” 

Andre remembers how even splashing in puddles in their socks and shoes was frowned upon by his father. “He’s all about discipline and common sense. He always asks us to think things through. Mum is more loving, and she taught us compassion and affection. She would nag at us, as mothers do, and when I was younger it was always ‘one ear in, one ear out’. But secretly, some of that stays within you.” 

As a parent to three young children now, he says, “I think I’m a good balance of my parents. I have Mum’s compassion, but if I need to discipline them, I will. I can be quite strict sometimes. After all, if you spoil them now, there’ll be trouble later.” (He does allow his kids to splash in puddles though.)

His wife, Belinda, who is Vietnamese-Australian, made her own way to Singapore because of love. She met Andre not long after he started Huber’s Butchery with his father and brother in 2007, and decided to move here six months into their courtship, her belongings shipped over along with choice cuts of meat in a Huber’s shipping container. In those early days of the business, Andre worked long hours and she didn’t know many people here, so they didn’t have much of a social life. But they were still in the honeymoon period, and she was happy to pitch in. “I went to work with him on weekends, and I would help pack sausages or help with the office stuff. So I’ve seen the business grow from the beginning.”