Clarity on the plate

Clarity comes with time. It is the distillation of your experience, and the story each plate has to tell. When I was younger, my cooking was muffled and confused, because I put too much on the plate to show what I could do. As you mature, you find that removing things, and amplifying the few that matter, is what makes the message clear. Guests should not have to guess whether it is fusion or French.

That clarity becomes your voice. In a blind tasting, or from a photograph, people should be able to say: this must be his.

When I came back to Malaysia, we lacked the skills. Most of our colleges trained people for large hotels, which is about cooking a thousand chickens, not the most delicious chicken for thirty guests. Neither is wrong. They are different jobs.

French cuisine was also misunderstood: onion soup and escargots, and at best foie gras. So we began with a brasserie, approachable and dressed down, and spent two years building a team from zero and teaching the fundamentals, starting with our own bread and butter. Only then did we move to Menara Hap Seng. Fine dining rarely makes money straight away. It takes time for people to know who you are, and time for them to fall in love with you. Only in the year before this conversation did we reach the point where we could sing our own song.

I can be inspired by nasi lemak, but I cannot make nasi lemak more nasi lemak, and I don’t think it is right to try. Nor do I like the word deconstruction. Too often it means the same thing made to look different, because you could not make a better one.

By then we were working with social enterprises, small stakeholders and artisans: single-origin chocolate from Chocolate Concierge, heirloom rice and grains from Langit, among others. It is a privilege to put their work on a plate and to show the growers that their sweat has not gone unnoticed. Our ingredients are world champions.

It was not always so. At first I was called the most difficult person on earth, because I kept asking suppliers for things they did not have. Microgreens came from Belgium, half dead by the time they arrived, so we grew pumpkins and other things on the brasserie’s rooftop. Suppliers only invest when they see guests respond, so the relationship has to be strong.

Chefs look to Borneo for wild ingredients partly because forest communities there still bring what they forage to market, which makes it accessible. That is good for their livelihoods. The danger is that an ingredient becomes a commodity and is abused. Petai used to be wild only. Now it is cultivated and harvested for sale before it has fully ripened, and it no longer tastes like petai.

The first contact between a guest and a dish is smell, then sight, so the eye must know where to start. What is the main ingredient, and what supports it? Is the sauce there to accompany, and is the garnish only a garnish? On our duck dish, the duck was cut long so it stood out, with everything grouped around it, and a rosette of pickled beetroot and radish from the farm set apart, deep red and pink. It was there to refresh the palate before the next mouthful, not only for beauty.

A room completes the meal. At Enfin my one rule for the interior architect was that everything be made in Malaysia, by local artisans: the lamps, the tables, the chairs. The tables were lower than standard, to suit how we sit. Each table had its own lamp, so the light gathered between the diners and you felt cocooned in a large space. The front entrance was a grille, because Malaysians grow up with grilles at home, and decorative grilles formed the backs of the sofas by the windows. There was a place for every handbag, so no one needed an extra stool.

Everything comes back to clarity. A chef who does not know whether they serve sharing plates or plated food cannot know how to design the room.

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