The ritual of fire and meat.

MeatMore officially launched at Bukit Bintang in October 2023: a SoHo-format steakhouse and cocktail bar in the heart of Kuala Lumpur's hospitality district. It took me into work I had not done before. Meat led the menu, fire set the discipline, and the cocktail bar ran beside the dining room as a second room of its own.

Free Malaysia Today covered the room on 27 October 2023 and gave it its line: MeatMore Elevates the Grilling of Meat to a Ritual. The Yum List, the same month, caught the atmosphere and the references the room was drawing on: “a trendy SoHo […] New York and very trendy.” Between them, the two pieces put MeatMore on the record as the most casual, most contemporary work I did in fourteen years of restaurants.

MeatMore is past tense now. It closed in 2025, after Shin’Labo. What stays with me is the Mortlach Room, the single malt and meat pairing salon I built with Mortlach (Diageo) inside MeatMore, and the idea the room set out to prove: that ageing, done properly, can carry a whole meal.

What inspired the room: a Soho dinner after Krug Italy

In the months before MeatMore opened, I went from a Krug event in Italy to London, a short hop to see friends. We ended up in Soho the way people tend to: drinks first, steak after. I sat in one of those small rooms built around a fire, ate simply and well, and thought: Kuala Lumpur needs to experience this. I did not mean a steakhouse in the old chophouse mould. I meant what Soho was building at that moment, which took the simplest premise there is (fire, meat, salt) and cooked it to the highest standard.

That evening was the eureka. MeatMore was my answer to it.

Soho’s two disciplines: open fire and extended ageing

What Soho was building rested on two techniques.

The first was open fire: live wood and ember beds, the heat managed by hand, the meat seared over glowing embers instead of gas. At temper Soho the chefs worked custom fire pits, reading and tending live wood to build the ember bed the steaks went straight onto. Blacklock pressed the meat to the grill with vintage iron presses for even contact and a clean sear. Humo and Firebird treated wood as an ingredient and chose oak or birch to put a particular note into the meat. Igni and Mountain used adjustable rigs, pulleys and winches that raised or lowered the big cuts over the flame. Across the scene, the fire sat at the centre of the cooking.

The second was extended dry-ageing. Beef hung in temperature-controlled rooms, sometimes against walls of Himalayan salt, for twenty-eight days, fifty-five days or longer. Enzymes break the meat down and moisture leaves it. What remains is concentrated and complex, sometimes faintly funky in the way a good blue cheese is. Ageing turns a good cut into a different kind of food. Blacklock ran fifty-five days on the picanha and the bone-in sirloin. Goodman aged Angus to seventy-five days when the season allowed. Kanpai Classic sat at the top end, with Miyazaki A5 wagyu grilled piece by piece at the table. The method was the same in every room: take what the season gives, age it patiently, and do it justice at the fire.

I came home from that trip with two questions. Could I bring a room like this to Kuala Lumpur properly, without cutting corners? And could I do it with the precision that the maisons I had worked with (Krug, Hennessy, Mortlach) would recognise?

The answer to the second was already in hand. Shin’Labo had been working on the art and science of protein ageing since it opened in 2022, so the discipline was mine and already running to a yōshoku standard. MeatMore applied it to a meat-led format, with the open-fire culture I had seen in Soho added on top. The Japanese hospitality standard at MeatMore, Omotenashi, came from the same place: Shin’Labo’s yōshoku practice, brought into a steakhouse.

The MeatMore format: SoHo at Bukit Bintang

The format was deliberate. SoHo (small office, home office) became a hospitality format that sat between Enfin’s fine-dining room, Shin’Labo’s yōshoku salon and the casual bistro of Bouchon Enfin. MeatMore spoke a different language again. Meat and fire led, the cocktail bar was where the room socialised, and under the contemporary look the operating standard was the culture of Omotenashi, the Japanese practice of wholehearted service that anticipates what a guest needs.

MeatMore was the first venue of Meat Collective Group, the operating company I founded in early 2023 to build concepts with several outlets. Japan’s Grand Champion in Mixology and Flaring led the bar programme. I name the title here and keep the person private.

For the bar I had Tokyo in mind more than London: the basement cocktail bar where the music stays low, the lighting does the work and the conversation belongs to the table. Kuala Lumpur had loud rooms, and louder ones. It did not have a place where good drinks and good meat could share a table without pounding music. MeatMore was meant to fill that gap. Friends gathered there and families chose it for celebrations. I wanted a neighbourhood place people came back to, where they were looked after and a good evening could happen without anyone having to perform.

The Yum List called it trendy, SoHo and New York, and that was the contemporary pulse the room was tuned to. Free Malaysia Today called it a ritual, and that was the discipline underneath. Both were true at once, and Omotenashi is what kept them together.

MeatMore is a trendy SoHo […] New York and very trendy.

The Yum List · October 2023

The catalogue: fine dining and comfort food

MeatMore set out to be two things at once: fine dining and happy food. The catalogue ran both voices side by side, and neither came second.

The premium side. Five sourcing origins carried the premium catalogue: Australian Wagyu (Dry-Aged Striploin; Pure Blood Wagyu Ribeye MB9+); Japanese Wagyu (A5 multi-cut experiences; Wagyu Beef Yee Sang); Japanese Miyazaki and Omi Wagyu (select cuts I chose myself); Australian Angus (Black Angus Ribeye MB5; Sirloin; Tomahawk); and USDA Beef (30-day Dry-Aged T-bone and Ribeye). On the floor, the signatures were Rump, Sirloin, Tenderloin, Boneless Rib Eye, T-bone and Flat Iron, grilled over charcoal to a hard crust around a medium-rare centre.

The comfort side. Next to the premium catalogue I ran a comfort programme cooked to the same standard: burgers of high-grade beef; Mash with Gravy, a quiet nod to KFC; Macaroni Cheese; and the Mamak Tail Bone Broth, a refined Sup Tulang made with wagyu oxtail, where European fine-dining technique met Malaysian street food at the premium end. The Beef Tartare sat between the two sides. It was made only with wagyu tenderloin and served with quail egg and farm herbs: fine-dining technique on a comfort-food plate.

Seasonal programmes marked the calendar. Pink Valentine brought a heart-shaped 400g Beef Ribeye with triple-cooked chips and champagne. Chinese New Year brought Wagyu Beef Yee Sang and a 600g Roast Beef add-on. The seasonal menus followed the festivals Malaysian diners keep.

The sourcing depended on a curated network of premium importers, direct-from-farm and purveyor relationships with partners who chose me as their chef of choice globally when stock was limited. I thank those partners privately and keep their names off the public record. That discretion is part of the work too.

The Mortlach Room: a single malt salon

Inside MeatMore, the Mortlach Room was the dedicated salon for pairing single malt with meat. The partnership with Mortlach (Diageo) put the Beast of Dufftown at the centre of my whisky work. It was Malaysia’s first Mortlach dining room, launched on 29 August 2023 with seats for up to twelve guests. The Room was built on three things.

The pairing programme. I built it with the maison. It opened with Mortlach 12 Year Old as the resident expression, anchored by the Room’s signature dish, the Mortlach New York Strip (USDA Prime Sirloin, 35-day dry-aged, paired with Mortlach 12 Year Old). Limited editions followed at a higher reserve level, most notably the Mortlach 30 Years, 2024 Special Release, which we chose together to deepen the Room’s reserve. In this protocol the malt sat at the centre of the plate.

Cut exclusivity. Patience decided the cuts, and there was no fixed list. The Room received cuts according to what the farms had and the quality of the animals in a given season, and I treated each cut the way it asked to be treated. The reserve ran on quality and availability: take what the season offers and give it the protocol it needs. The partners were never asked to fill a pre-set menu.

Partnership as teaching. Beyond pairing and exclusivity, the Mortlach partnership taught me something. The distillery’s 2.81-times distillation, and the patience and control behind it, became the framework for my own ageing programme. In fourteen years of restaurants, the Mortlach Room was the closest I came to building a room around one discipline learned from outside my own kitchen.

It is the third room within a restaurant in my Restaurant Legacy, after the Krug Chef’s Table at Enfin (April 2016) and the Hennessy Salon at Enfin (from November 2016). The pattern is the same in all three: one maison, one discipline, a private salon inside a public room. The Mortlach Room was the most precisely built of the three, because a working ageing programme sat at its core and turned the malt’s distillation method into one of my own.

The dedicated ager: how the programme worked

At the centre of the Mortlach Room stood a dedicated dry-ageing cabinet, a single-zone counter unit by Precision (UK) fitted into custom joinery. It ran my structured ageing programme for the whole working life of the room. The programme was not new. It was the Shin’Labo ageing method, by then a year and a half into its development, applied to meat. What Shin’Labo had been refining in protein since 2022 found its meat-led form at MeatMore.

The cabinet ran a 15 / 35 / 90-day ladder: fifteen days for the floor-service standard, thirty-five for my signature window, and ninety for the reserve that anchored the Room.

Three ageing programmes ran in the cabinet at once, Whiskey, Butter and Kombu, each tuned to a different kitchen tradition. Whiskey served the Room’s signature pairing. Butter carried the European craft tradition. Kombu linked MeatMore to the yōshoku work Shin’Labo was doing in the same years. The protocols behind them stay in the house and are not for publication. The discipline belongs to the room; the technique is mine.

Barrel wood from the maison was also there for smoking. It closed a quiet circle: Mortlach’s terroir, having shaped the spirit, came back to shape the meat. Three programmes in the cabinet and one wood programme over the fire made four, all run from the one ager and all making the same case.

The closure (2025)

MeatMore closed in 2025, and the steakhouse passed into the record; the Mortlach Room inside it had closed in 2024. The closure followed Shin’Labo’s in December 2024, as part of the wider 2025 pivot, after Enfin (Menara Hap Seng) and Bouchon Enfin in the longer story of the restaurants I have closed.

What came forward from MeatMore is what came forward from every room I closed: the discipline the room was built around. The ageing ladder, the pairing protocol, Omotenashi as the operating standard, and the idea that a room can be built around one discipline learned from someone else have all travelled into the cultural diplomacy work I do today.

From the archive

A wider record of the room in its working life: table service, the lighting, and the room as guests arrived.