What makes a meal luxury
Seventy-four minutes with Tien Chew on luxury, fine dining and where Malaysian food is going.
In July 2024, while my restaurants were still open, I sat down with Tien Chew for the fourth episode of his podcast, Chew On This. Tien is a food writer who has eaten my food for more than ten years, and his question was a good one: can luxury dining go too far? These are the points I would still stand behind.
I like things with gravitas: a history, some weight behind them. Without that, a high price means very little.
The luxury I remember best has nothing to do with money. Over the years I have cooked for friends’ parents and grandparents. Friends came to dine while they were pregnant, and when their babies grew old enough for solid food, some of them ate my cooking too. That is what luxury means to me: what a meal means to the people at the table.
Put gold leaf on a burger to add a few zeros and you have a luxury ingredient, which is a different thing. You do not need to know how to cook to do that.
The day you think you are the best, you stop. There is no curiosity left and no discovery, and what you are doing is manufacturing. The cooks I respect at the highest level are stubborn, and often a little unsure of themselves. They always believe the dish can be better. People mistake that for arrogance.
I have to remind myself to let people make mistakes, because nobody learns without them. During service there are none: guests are paying for their evening, and you do not spend it on your own practice. In prep, in research and at the family meal, there is room.
I gave no recipes in my kitchen. I taught what each product is and how to use it, and the cooks learnt to make the food without a sheet to follow. The family meal became their test: I would order ordinary ingredients and ask them to make something good with them. Taken seriously, that makes a good cook quickly. It is how I was taught.
Some dishes begin as accidents. The durian and Roquefort crème brûlée started late one night on a boat, when the only things left in the galley were durian and blue cheese. It should not work, and it does, with champagne. I served it at my first Krug dinner, to a guest who had never tasted durian. When a former president of the house left, her parting words to me were: don’t stop being crazy.
You can learn technique anywhere now. What France and Japan gave me was culture. Both countries cook by the season, and anyone there can tell you what arrives in autumn. More than that, I learnt why people eat what they eat, and when, and how a meal is put together. Once I understood their cultures, I began to appreciate my own, and that is where my own story in food comes from. I am not inventing a cuisine. I take what has been passed down and tell it through who I am.
It also showed me the difference between a novice and a master. A novice is busy shouting ideas. A master reduces, until a dish is about one thing.
I grew up in Jinjang, a Chinese new village in Kuala Lumpur. KFC was my idea of fine dining: white plates, a knife and fork, and only on a special occasion. I was ten or eleven when I had my first steak, and I have never forgotten it.
The greatest cook I know is my grandmother. She had no training. She cooked from memory and discovery, and could recreate a taste without knowing what was in it. Watching people close their eyes over her food, and later over mine, is what made me want to be a chef.
In Japan, a chef will not cook omakase for everyone, because it depends on knowing you: what you like, how much you eat, what you are celebrating. When guests booked my personal omakase, I called them two weeks beforehand, and I seldom took a first visit. That knowledge, and the time it takes, is part of what you pay for.
Caviar is. Caviar is time: you cannot make a sturgeon grow faster, and the best has as little added as possible, so what you taste is the fish itself. Wagyu is something we bred. The sturgeon was here long before us.
Truffles are the most abused. They do not like humidity, and by the time they reach us they are a week or two old and have lost much of what makes them special. Gold leaf has no taste at all.
The most remarkable luxury meal I have had was vegetarian, in Taiwan: mosses and plants I never thought could taste so good, with all the savoury depth of meat. It taught me that satisfaction, not fullness, is the aim. You should come in looking beautiful and leave looking beautiful, never feeling you have overdone it.
We now have a category called modern Malaysian, and I am grateful to the chefs who took it on, Darren Teoh among them. Young chefs are coming home, and chefs now appear in fashion and lifestyle magazines, not only food ones.
But we are not in a golden age. We are at the start of defining who we are. When an English or a Japanese chef says they cook modern Malaysian food, we can talk about a golden age. To get there, Malaysians have to stand by their restaurants: eat in them, and tell their friends. If we do not, they will close.
If you are not passionate, do not do it. You will not eat, sleep or take holidays when other people do. But when someone loves your food, the reward is immediate, and no other job gives you that. The nearest I can compare it to is the day a father first holds his child.
It's never the price, but the meaning behind it.
James Won, on Chew On This
The art of luxury is looking after a guest completely, so that they leave as beautifully as they came.