Shin'Labo, six months in
Twenty-five minutes on BFM 89.9 about a smaller room, rising costs and Malaysian talent.
In September 2022, six months after Shin'Labo opened, I joined Freda Liu on BFM 89.9's Open For Business. The name plays on the Japanese shin, which can mean true or new, and labo, laboratory in Japanese and French. The idea was Japanese cuisine and French technique, with Malaysian ingredients. These are the points I made on air.
I have the pandemic to thank for Shin’Labo. My previous restaurant, Enfin, had nothing wrong with its cooking or its service, but the room was very large. It was built for events, and even forty covers did not fill it. After years of running restaurants in Malaysia, it was time to change: smaller, more intimate rooms, fewer people passing through, and all of the attention on quality.
I also wanted to change how I ran the business. The aim was a platform to find Malaysian talent and give it room to grow. As we get older, all of us become a little less relevant, and we need to listen to the younger ones.
With the borders closed, people dined at home and discovered Malaysian chefs and new places to eat. They wanted small plates, variety and more flavours, and tasting menus and Malaysian ingredients were becoming popular. Malaysia has always been a place where cuisines meet; now that was showing in fine dining too.
Above all, guests wanted discretion: fewer seats, and the feeling of not being watched. That is why private dining rooms were doing so well. Our guests in those first six months were mostly regulars. They felt safe with us, and they expected the hygiene to be right without our having to say so.
Logistics had become a nightmare. Even the trip down from our contract farm in Cameron Highlands cost far more, and anything imported from Japan or France cost three times what it had. Labour was harder still. With the borders open and the ringgit weak, our talent was being drawn abroad, and we ran very lean.
So we had to choose our battles. Guests kept asking when lunch and high tea would start, and we could only open for dinner, in the main dining room, without the private room at the same time. For us the point is that you leave with a perfect experience. If we cannot give you the attention you deserve, we would rather not take the booking.
Travel is how I think and how I create, because I am led by culture: how people eat, what they eat and why. I champion our Malaysian identity, and I want to understand how others make their ingredients, because at this level you cannot open a bottle of sauce and pour it out. At Shin’Labo we made our own soy sauce and aged all our proteins, seafood and red meat alike. Ageing in Europe and in Japan is very different, shaped by the weather and by how little space a city kitchen has, and much of what I learnt went into our techniques.
In cooking terms, yes. We have real talent, Darren Teoh of Dewakan among them, and our cuisine and technique are no less than those of countries the guide already covers. What we lacked was exposure, and the effort to market ourselves as a country. At Shin’Labo we prepared to an international standard regardless; after the borders opened, almost forty per cent of our guests came from abroad.
As an industry, though, we were not quite there. Some neighbouring countries were designing small restaurants with extraordinary attention to detail, and we did not yet have enough of those. I was cautiously optimistic.
By then I had been Malaysia’s only Krug ambassador for eight years. Krug recognises individuality. When Maggie Henriquez left as president of the house, she told me that the day I stopped being crazy would be the day I was no longer needed. The house believes in absolute quality without compromise, which is what I ask of my own team. When they see a house like that holding the same standards, it stops being just Chef being Chef.
It also put me among peers: forty-four culinary ambassadors around the world, sharing ideas each year in books and films. Cooking is never finished. A carrot yesterday and a carrot today are not the same.
Until the day you die, you'll still be learning, because it's a living art.
James Won, on BFM 89.9
A carrot yesterday and a carrot today are not the same, so the learning never stops.