Taylor's Culinary Institute

What I learned in the houses meets the curriculum at TCI — where industry experience is held as scholarship.

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The conviction that drew me to Taylor’s Culinary Institute is the conviction TCI holds itself: that industry experience earned across years of practice deserves to come into the classroom and be recognised as scholarship. The certified pathway is not the only pathway. The practitioners who walked the long road through actual kitchens have wisdom worth naming on the public record — and TCI’s continuing professional programme exists for exactly this. The partnership exists because we agreed.

The institute

Taylor’s Culinary Institute — TCI — is part of Taylor’s University, in Subang Jaya, Selangor. The parent university’s Hospitality & Leisure Management discipline ranks among the world’s top thirty in the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2026; TCI’s culinary, pastry, and beverage programmes lead the region’s vocational ladder for serious practitioners. The institute teaches through what it calls the living classroom — students paired directly with industry chefs across diplomas, short courses, and the Master Class series at Truffles Restaurant, the working kitchen and dining room on the campus.

I have taught at TCI since 2021, and in June 2026 the relationship was renewed as an appointment to Adjunct Professor for the 2026–2028 term. The appointment sits within the Faculty of Social Sciences & Leisure Management, at faculty standing — assessment, curriculum contribution, accountability to the academic framework. The disciplines that govern my faculty work are the same disciplines that govern any other faculty member’s. That is the standing TCI offers, and what I have tried to honour.

What I bring to TCI

Twelve years inside the world’s most formidable luxury houses is what I bring. Krug Ambassade Chef. Gaggenau Spokesperson. Hennessy partner. Inaugural ambassador for The Plan and for Mepra. Long-form work with The Macallan, Mortlach, BMW, and HSBC. What those houses taught me is not a single technique or a single style — it is the craft of brand-building. How identity is shaped. How meaning is held in detail. How a maison earns the standing the public confers on it.

That craft is what the F&B industry rarely receives in formal training. Restaurants are taught how to cook; few are taught how to build the identity, the marketing presence, and the intellectual property that make the cooking commercially viable in luxury hospitality. The appointment at TCI is where I bring this body of work into the curriculum — drawn from inside the houses, taught at the standing of the institution that hosts me.

The bridge between European luxury craft and the Asian hospitality industry is what the work has carried for twelve years. The classroom at TCI is where that bridge becomes formal — where the next generation of practitioners learns it as record, not as anecdote.

The professorship covers two domains — culinary sustainability and restaurant entrepreneurship. Beyond the lecture hall the appointment carries short courses and public seminars, professional and community service, and the industry and peer links that connect the school to the houses and the wider profession. The sustainability work draws from the indigenous-gastronomy and conservation work I lead through Serumpun Sarawak. The entrepreneurship work draws from twelve years and six restaurant concepts — Brasserie Enfin, Enfin by James Won, Bouchon Enfin, Shin’Labo, MeatMore, BadBoyCooks — and the Be Kind pandemic-era pivot. I teach the closures as honestly as the openings; what fails to last teaches the same way the lasting does.

How I teach

The professorship is held in three modes. Each does work the others cannot.

The inspiration lecture

The inspiration lecture is where I meet the students first — not to teach technique, but to ask the question technique cannot answer alone: why are you in this kitchen? Passion is what I am asked to find in them, and the truth is the new generation finds it harder to muster than mine did. The lecture is a serious encounter with that question. Not a motivational talk — a frank conversation about practice, about discipline, about what cooking asks of a life that wants to be lived seriously.

The experience workshop

The experience workshop is where the lecture becomes the hand. We work side by side, in the kitchen, with the techniques the curriculum names but rarely lets the student feel under proper hands. Practice is the mother of all skills, but practice without supervision drifts into bad habit. The workshop is where I correct, where I demonstrate, where I let them fail in the safety of someone watching.

The Master Class series at Truffles

The Master Class series is the third mode, held at Truffles Restaurant — TCI’s working professional kitchen. The format is consistent: practical application in the institute’s facilities; direct mentorship on fine-dining menu design and plating; and live showcase, where students prepare high-profile collaboration dinners under real-world pressure. The menu for each showcase is curated and guided by me — themed, balanced, technically scoped to what the cohort can deliver — but the ideation and execution belong to the students. They cook. They serve. They face the room. I am present as guarantor, not as performer; the students are the practitioners the audience came to meet. In TCI’s own student-life features, the masterclasses have been described as “engaging, interactive, and intelligent” — “a dive into the minutiae” of culinary arts. Those are the students’ words, returned to me. I do not have a curriculum that can teach them to a student who has not been in the room.

December 2023 — the dinner

On 9 December 2023, Truffles Restaurant hosted the Chef James Won Collaboration Dinner — VIPs by my invitation, the evening hosted formally by TCI. Her Royal Highness Tuanku Sultanah Hajjah Kalsom of Pahang and His Excellency Axel Cruau, Ambassadeur de France en Malaisie sat at the table. Students prepared the courses under guidance. I addressed the guests.

I paired the wines and the champagnes — twelve years of work inside the alcohol houses is what made the pairing possible. I prepared the dining room with the savoir faire I had learned inside the maisons: which whiteware lands the dish, which tableware holds the discipline of service, which sequence of courses reads as a thought. German precision from BMW, Italian styling from Mepra — both maisons are named for a reason; I have served alongside their teams and learned what each understands about the materiality of luxury.

And the menu protocol. Classical fine-dining service carries a structure: the order of courses, the rhythm of service, the precedence of who is served first when royalty or state dignitaries are present. The classical premise is the foundation; it must be honoured before it can be broken. Where modernisation, place, and culture asked for adaptation — and they did, with Her Royal Highness and His Excellency at the table — the adaptation was made consciously, against a discipline first. The students saw both: the protocol intact where it had to be intact, and the protocol broken where breaking served the room better than honouring.

The discipline is in the detail. Bite sizes are sized for the mouth — neither too small to read as miserly nor too large to require a public negotiation with the fork. Proteins are deboned wherever a guest of state should not be asked to navigate a bone in dignified company. Sauces are rested at the consistency that holds against the spoon and does not drip onto the linen as the bite is lifted. These are the small disciplines royal-grade service requires, named only as a few among many.

The students were in the room. They saw the dinner from the inside — the choices, the operations, the demands of serving at the level the world’s top one per cent expects. That is the part of teaching the curriculum cannot abstract; only the room itself can teach it. Tatler Malaysia documented the evening for the wider record. TCI itself framed the chapter as “an invaluable learning experience” — the students returned the same phrase in their own words. The dinner is on TCI’s institutional record; the lesson is in the practitioners who served it.

What returns

What returns to me from the appointment is more than I bring.

The students return their words — and their work. The masterclasses described as “engaging, interactive, and intelligent”, the curriculum described as “a dive into the minutiae”, the December dinner named “an invaluable learning experience” — these are the students’ own framings on TCI’s public channels, not mine. Alumnus Yuda Bustara carried his TCI training into a public profile of his own. The institute’s mentorship has been credited as a key driver for students who go on to win gold medals at WorldSkills and similar international competitions; the partnership’s record, from the institute’s side, is the wider one — and the professorship sits inside it.

TCI returned institutional pride. In late 2024, when the French government conferred the Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite Agricole, TCI marked the occasion with an official statement — “Honouring Gastronomic Greatness: A Culinary Maestro Chef James Won Receives the Prestigious Ordre du Mérite Agricole.” The institute framed the honour as institutional pride; the standing the lectureship carries belongs to TCI as much as to me.

And the Embassy of France in Malaysia, in its 2024 award announcement, named the teaching directly: “gives back and passes on to younger generations, as he does at Taylor University.” The teaching crossed into the citation itself. The lecturesh