Engineering at the table
My work with BMW: German precision, lifestyle curation, and evenings where cars, design and food share a room.
BMW is the marque my lifestyle and mobility work has been measured against. The spirits houses put a cuvée at the centre of the table. The kitchen architecture maisons work on the room around the cooking. BMW sits somewhere else, in work that is mostly not about the plate, where engineering, design and lifestyle are in constant conversation. The relationship has run for the better part of a decade, through two main programmes: The Society at Enfin (2017) and the BMW i7 electrified menu at Shin'Labo (2024).
The relationship
BMW Malaysia and I have worked together where the marque is most at home: private hospitality, brand events, programmes for its dealership network, and evenings that bring cars, design and food together. We have kept the work quiet. Restraint is how BMW operates, and the relationship has respected that over two distinct periods and almost a decade.
BMW does not bring a culinary subject to the table. It brings a century of engineering, a design language people recognise, and a lifestyle programme that asks me to think beyond the kitchen. I have cooked with all of that in mind.
The Society: private dinners at Enfin, June to December 2017
The first formally documented BMW programme was The Society, a series of private dinners at Enfin by James Won (Menara Hap Seng), run with BMW Malaysia Sdn Bhd under a formal Appointment Letter dated 16 May 2017.
Programme period: 1 June 2017 to 31 December 2017. Format: eight private dinners over the seven months, four hosted by BMW Malaysia and its authorised dealers and four by another event partner.
The Society followed BMW’s quiet convention, and the Appointment Letter spells it out: minimal media, guests’ names kept private, and the exclusivity of the evening protected. I have kept to that in both periods of the relationship.
On BMW’s side, the programme was run by Han Sang Yun (Managing Director, BMW Malaysia), Thomas Senser (Finance Director) and Ariezs Khairudin (Marketing, and the day-to-day contact). I name the relationship here only at that level. The convention it set has applied to every BMW evening since.
The Society also matters for what it started. By June 2017, three years before the formal Krug Chef’s Table programme had matured at Enfin and a year before the Tapestry × Hennessy six-senses series, BMW had already chosen Enfin as its private dinner partner for the year. My lifestyle curation work began at Menara Hap Seng in 2017, long before the BMW i7.
The BMW i7: an electrified menu at Shin’Labo, 2024
Seven years after The Society, BMW came back for the launch of the BMW i7, its electric flagship. I cooked the launch’s electrified menu at Shin’Labo, which put BMW’s move into electric cars alongside the yōshoku room at Lalaport KL.
It kept to the same minimal-media rule The Society had set. I describe it here only in outline; the guests and the menus stay private under BMW’s protocol. That is why there is so little detail on this page. The full account belongs to BMW.
What the relationship has made possible
In both periods, the BMW work has asked for the kind of evening where cars, food, design and hospitality meet in one room. In Malaysia, BMW is the marque most at ease hosting that kind of conversation.
The partnership reaches into private and corporate hospitality too: events for BMW owners, its dealership networks and corporate partners, and the wider audience the marque has in Malaysia and the region. We keep it restrained, and private events stay private. Eight years on from the 2017 Appointment Letter, the minimal-media rule still applies.
The lifestyle and mobility work sits at a deliberate distance from the food-led partnerships elsewhere on this page. It meets contemporary luxury in places that are mostly not about the plate. BMW is the most important partnership in this group, and it shows how the standards I keep in the kitchen apply to lifestyle curation as a whole. How food appears alongside lifestyle is beside the point.
Film: BMW with James Won
Additional films
Additional film: BMW i7 × Shin’Labo
Media exposure for The Society is intentionally kept at a minimum, as part of the direction to maintain anonymity of the guests and the exclusivity of the event.
BMW Malaysia × Enfin Central Sdn Bhd Appointment Letter · 16 May 2017
Selected Press
Full archive →- BMW Malaysia × Enfin Central Sdn Bhd Appointment Letter — The Society private dinner programme Programme period 1 June to 31 December 2017 · eight private dinners 16 May 2017
Engineering as design. Mobility as lifestyle. Cross-disciplinary curation as discipline. BMW's world is wider than gastronomy alone, and this part of my work is held at the wider standing the marque carries.