Career Confessions: Jazreel Low thought she was done with work. Shared Table brought her back

Jazreel Low genuinely thought she was done with work.

After selling her overseas spa businesses and stepping away from the day-to-day running of Aramsa, the entrepreneur spent about a year and a half enjoying semi-retirement. Her days involved more knitting, more mahjong and, perhaps most importantly, more time for herself. Starting another business wasn’t on the agenda.

Then a familiar space in Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park became available.

It was formerly home to Canopy Garden Dining, which Jazreel had operated for about 16 years. When the opportunity arose to take over the space again, sentiment won. “When we won the tender, I actually became quite emotional. It felt like coming home,” she says.
The result is Shared Table, her latest F&B venture and, in some ways, a second chance at an idea she first had two decades ago.

From Star Search to starting businesses

Jazreel’s career has never followed a particularly conventional path.

She began as a model in the 1980s and was part of the first Star Search in 1988 before eventually leaving acting full-time for the business world. Since then, she’s tried her hand at everything from a music production house and bridal shop to F&B and wellness.

One of her biggest gambles was Aramsa, the garden spa she opened in Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park 20 years ago. At the time, building a spa within a public park and integrating wellness with nature was an ambitious proposition with no guarantee of success.

“I believed strongly in the concept,” she says. Two decades and numerous awards later, it’s a risk she’s proud she took.

But not every risk paid off.

“Being ahead of the market isn’t necessarily the same thing as being right”

Ask Jazreel about her biggest career mistake and she points to The Green Room, the vegetarian and vegan restaurant she opened alongside Aramsa.

She had wanted to extend Aramsa’s wellness philosophy into its F&B offering and was convinced diners would embrace the concept.

They did, she jokes, “just not enough of them to keep the business going”.

Looking back, Jazreel believes the idea may simply have come too early. “Being ahead of the market isn’t necessarily the same thing as being right for the customer at that particular moment,” she says.

It also taught her one of the tougher realities of entrepreneurship: believing in something doesn’t automatically make it a viable business.

“At some point, you have to look at the numbers and be honest with yourself,” she says.

Walking away, she adds, isn’t necessarily admitting defeat. Sometimes it’s recognising that your time, money and energy are better spent elsewhere.

It’s a lesson that would eventually influence Shared Table.

What Jazreel Low learned from past business mistakes

Years of running restaurants and spas have also made Jazreel far less romantic about entrepreneurship.

“When you’re younger, you can be very romantic about business. You think, ‘If I build something wonderful, people will come.’ Well, sometimes they don’t,” she says.

In F&B, good food alone isn’t enough. Customers are also paying for the ambience, service, atmosphere and how a space makes them feel. The same applies to Aramsa, she says, where customers aren’t simply purchasing a spa treatment but an entire experience.

That thinking informed Shared Table. Unlike The Green Room, Jazreel didn’t want its wellness-inspired approach to food to feel overly restrictive. The concept and experience had to work commercially too.

Yes, she’s wanted to quit before

After 20 years of Aramsa, has Jazreel ever wanted to walk away from it all?

Her answer is refreshingly straightforward.

“Anyone who tells you they’ve never wanted to quit their business is either lying or has never actually run one.”

Those thoughts became particularly real during the Covid lockdowns, when she didn’t know how she would keep the business afloat or continue paying her staff.

Even outside of a crisis, running Aramsa comes with its challenges. The business relies heavily on people, from finding and retaining good therapists to maintaining standards while keeping prices accessible. Having a longstanding core team capable of handling the day-to-day operations is ultimately what allowed Jazreel to step away.

And for a while, she was perfectly happy staying away.

She really did think she was retired

There was no secret plan for Jazreel’s next act.

“I wasn’t thinking about starting the next business. I genuinely thought I was done,” she says of her semi-retirement.

Shared Table changed that, largely because of its location.

Returning to the former Canopy space carried an emotional pull, but it also gave Jazreel an opportunity to revisit something that hadn’t quite worked the first time around.

The Green Room taught her not to make wellness-focused food so restrictive. Shared Table is, in her words, “a second chance at an idea I had 20 years ago, but with more experience and a better understanding of what people want.”

Perhaps that’s also why she doesn’t seem particularly interested in erasing her past mistakes.
Asked what career decision she would change if given the opportunity, Jazreel doesn’t actually pick one.

“When you’re younger, you think you have to grab every opportunity because you don’t know which one will be your big break,” she says. “So maybe I wouldn’t change the mistake. I would just make sure I learned from it.”

At this stage, success looks different

After a career spanning entertainment, wellness, hospitality and F&B, Jazreel’s definition of ambition has shifted too.

“When you’re younger, you want to prove yourself. You want bigger businesses, bigger numbers, more recognition. You think success means constantly moving forward,” she says.
Today, success is much simpler: having the freedom to choose what she spends her time on and, importantly, who she spends it with.

She still wants to create things, but she wants them to have meaning, to work with people she likes and to actually enjoy the process. She’s also learnt to relinquish something many entrepreneurs struggle with: control.

“I’ve also become much more comfortable with not having to control everything,” she says. “That’s probably one of the biggest changes for me.”

For someone who thought she had already closed the chapter on working life, Shared Table isn’t exactly a return to the old grind. Instead, it feels like Jazreel is approaching work on her own terms, armed with the mistakes, failures and lessons she picked up the first time around.

And maybe that’s the real career confession: starting again doesn’t necessarily mean starting from scratch.