The founding year
Four chapters, named on the first day and kept.
On 10 July 2025 we unveiled Serumpun Sarawak in Kuala Lumpur and said, in public, what the year would hold: Osaka in August, Mulu in October and a finale in Kuching the following April. On 1 April 2026 we closed that year at Sarawak Cultural Village. This is a short account of the four chapters in between, and of what the year was for.
We came to the launch at Le Méridien Petaling Jaya with the year already planned. The Sarawak State Government stood behind it, the work was aligned from the start with Kuching’s standing as a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy, and the three chapters to come were announced with their dates. At the centre were Sarawak’s thirty-four ethnic groups, whose food knowledge the movement exists to record, protect and pass on.
Naming the chapters on the first day was deliberate. A promise made in public is one you have to keep.
From 5 to 8 August 2025 we cooked at Seaside Studio CASO, alongside Sarawak Week at World Expo Osaka. It was the first time the work stood before an audience from across Asia and beyond. The menu showed one land in five terrains, and each course was given to a Sarawak people as a tribute: River to the Penan, Forest to the Iban, Mountain to the Bidayuh, Coast to the Melanau and Sea to the Kayan. Osaka asked whether this cuisine could hold its ground on an international stage. It could.
Two months later we went back to the rainforest. From 2 to 4 October 2025 we cooked in Gunung Mulu, Sarawak’s UNESCO World Heritage park, where the weather decides most things. Each morning began with the question of whether the plane could land, and when the Baram ran high we could not forage for tekuyung, so we looked for what the land offered instead. Mulu asked the more important question: could the cuisine go home to the ground that grew it? It went home.
In March 2026, UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy Kuching endorsed Serumpun Sarawak. On 1 April 2026 we held the Kuching Finale at Sarawak Cultural Village, Santubong: one evening, forty covers, and all of it Sarawak’s, on the plate and in the kitchen.
The night belonged to the In Motion mentees. Chef Robbie Balcarek, Chef Laura Sim Bara and Chef John Lim shaped it and carried it out in full. I guided, and stood behind them. Sarawak Cultural Village became the first institution to put the movement’s thinking into daily practice, on ground that has kept Sarawak’s living culture since 1990.
One chef taking Sarawak’s food abroad was never the point of the founding year. What mattered was showing that the knowledge belongs to the communities who keep it, and that the work can carry on in other hands. If a conservation movement cannot outlive its founder, it has failed. On 1 April we saw, for the first time, that this one can.
After April 2026 the movement went into its second year. The mentee programme goes on, and so do the partnerships with the institutions and with UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy Kuching.
If a conservation movement cannot outlive its founder, it has failed.
James Won
We said what we would do, and then we did it.