The ritual of fire and meat.

In October 2023, MeatMore opened at Bukit Bintang — a SoHo-format steakhouse and cocktail bar in the heart of Kuala Lumpur's hospitality district. The format placed my portfolio in work I had not done before: meat as protagonist, fire as discipline, the cocktail bar as parallel architecture to the dining room.

Free Malaysia Today’s coverage on 27 October 2023 carried the room’s defining single line — MeatMore Elevates the Grilling of Meat to a Ritual. The Yum List, the same month, captured the room’s atmosphere and its cultural reference points: “a trendy SoHo […] New York and very trendy.” Together, the two pieces placed MeatMore on the public record as the most casually contemporary work I had done across twelve years of restaurant work.

MeatMore is now past tense. It closed in 2024, the year before Shin’Labo. What endures is the Mortlach Room — the dedicated single-malt-and-meat pairing salon I developed in partnership with Mortlach (Diageo) and housed within MeatMore — and the principle the room argued: that ageing, properly applied, can carry a meal.

What inspired the room — a Soho dinner, after Krug Italy

In the months before MeatMore opened, I crossed from a Krug showcase in Italy to London — a hop across to see friends. We ended up in Soho the way one tends to end up in Soho: drinks first, steak after. I sat in one of those small fire-led rooms, ate honestly, and thought: this is what Kuala Lumpur needs to experience. Not a steakhouse in the heritage chophouse mould — but the version Soho was building at that moment, the version that took the simplest premise — fire, meat, salt — and held it to the highest discipline.

That evening was the eureka. MeatMore was the answer.

Soho’s twin disciplines — open fire, extended ageing

What Soho was building rested on two technical disciplines.

The first was the open fire — live wood and ember beds where the heat is managed and the meat sears against glowing embers, not gas. temper Soho worked with custom fire pits, the chefs reading and managing live wood fires to build the bed of embers steaks were seared directly over; Blacklock held the meat against the grill with vintage iron presses for even contact and a perfect sear; Humo and Firebird treated the wood as an ingredient rather than fuel, choosing oak or birch to write a particular note into the meat. Igni and Mountain worked adjustable rigs — pulleys and winches that brought the meat closer or further from the flame for precision over the big cuts. Across the scene, the fire became the centre of the cooking, not an appliance to it.

The second was extended dry-ageing. Beef held in temperature-controlled rooms — sometimes against Himalayan salt walls — for twenty-eight days, fifty-five days, even longer. Enzymes break down what the meat carries; moisture leaves; what remains is concentrated, complex, sometimes faintly funky in the way good blue cheese is faintly funky. Ageing turns a good cut into a different kind of food. Blacklock ran a fifty-five-day window on the picanha and the bone-in sirloin; Goodman held seventy-five-day Angus when the season allowed; Kanpai Classic sat at the upper end with Miyazaki A5 wagyu grilled individually at the table. The discipline was the same across the rooms: receive what the season offers, age it with patience, honour it at the fire.

I came back from that trip with two questions. Could I bring this kind of room to Kuala Lumpur, properly, without compromise? And could I do it with the precision the maisons I had worked with — Krug, Hennessy, Mortlach — would recognise?

The answer to the second was already in motion. Shin’Labo had been perfecting the art and science of protein ageing since its 2022 opening — the discipline was already mine, already running, already held to a yōshoku standard. MeatMore was the translation of that discipline into a meat-specific format, with the open-fire culture Soho had taught me grafted on top. The Japanese hospitality standard that came naturally to MeatMore — Omotenashi — came from the same place: Shin’Labo’s yōshoku discipline, carried into a steakhouse manner.

The MeatMore format — SoHo, Bukit Bintang

The MeatMore format was deliberate. SoHo — small office, home office — translated to a hospitality format that sat between the fine-dining room of Enfin, the yōshoku salon of Shin’Labo, and the casual bistro of Bouchon Enfin. MeatMore brought a different vocabulary again — meat-led, fire-led, with the cocktail bar as the room’s social architecture, and the culture of Omotenashi — the Japanese hospitality philosophy of wholehearted, anticipatory service — as the operational standard beneath the contemporary aesthetic.

MeatMore was the first venue concept of Meat Collective Group — the operating company I founded in early 2023 to build multi-outlet concepts. The bar programme was led by Japan’s Grand Champion in Mixology and Flaring — the institution honoured, the individual held privately.

Beyond the food, the bar mood I had in mind was Tokyo, not London — the underground cocktail bar where the music sits low, the lighting holds the room, and the conversation belongs to the table, not the speakers. Kuala Lumpur had loud rooms; it had louder rooms; what it did not have was a place where good drinks and good meat could sit together without the noise and the pounding music. MeatMore was meant for that gap. A room friends gathered in. A room families chose for the celebration. A neighbourhood place to come back to — somewhere familiar, somewhere to be looked after, somewhere a good evening could happen without performance.

The Yum List’s trendy SoHo […] New York and very trendy framing captures the contemporary pulse the room was tuned to. Free Malaysia Today’s ritual framing captures the discipline that ran beneath it. Both were true at once — and Omotenashi held 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 was deliberately dual — both fine dining and happy food. The catalogue held two voices in parallel, neither subordinate to the other.

The premium side. Five sourcing origins carried my 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 curated personally); Australian Angus (Black Angus Ribeye MB5; Sirloin; Tomahawk); and USDA Beef (30-day Dry-Aged T-bone and Ribeye). Floor-service signatures included Rump, Sirloin, Tenderloin, Boneless Rib Eye, T-bone, and Flat Iron — grilled over charcoal to a crust held against a medium-rare centre.

The comfort side. Alongside the premium catalogue, I ran an elevated-comfort programme — high-grade beef burgers; Mash with Gravy as a quiet KFC homage; Macaroni Cheese; the Mamak Tail Bone Broth (a Sup Tulang-style refinement using wagyu oxtail, where European fine-dining technique met Malaysian street food at the premium end). The Beef Tartare, made exclusively with wagyu tenderloin and served with quail egg and farm herbs, sat between the two sides — fine-dining technique on a comfort-food plate.

Seasonal programmes punctuated the calendar. Pink Valentine carried a heart-shaped 400g Beef Ribeye with triple-cooked chips and champagne. Chinese New Year introduced Wagyu Beef Yee Sang and a 600g succulent Roast Beef add-on. The seasonal programme honoured the cultural calendar that the wider Malaysian dining audience kept.

The sourcing depended on a curated network of premium import partners — direct-from-farm and purveyor relationships that selected me as their chef of choice globally where stock was limited. The partners are honoured privately, not on the public record. The discretion is, again, part of the discipline.

The Mortlach Room — the dedicated single-malt salon

Within MeatMore, the Mortlach Room functioned as the dedicated single-malt-and-meat pairing salon — the partnership with Mortlach (Diageo) that placed the Beast of Dufftown at the centre of my whisky portfolio. Malaysia’s first Mortlach dining room, launched on 29 August 2023 with seating for up to twelve guests. The Room’s architecture rested on three pillars.

The pairing programme. Co-curated with the maison, the programme launched 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-edition expressions followed at higher reserve standing — most notably the Mortlach 30 Years, 2024 Special Release — selected jointly to amplify the Room’s reserve. The pairing protocol placed the malt at the centre of the plate, not beside it.

Cut exclusivity. Governed by patience rather than a fixed catalogue. The Room received cuts based on farm availability and animal quality during a particular season, and I honoured those cuts with the protocol they asked for. The reserve sat on a quality-and-availability discipline — receive what the season offers; honour it with the protocol it asks for — rather than a pre-set menu the partners were asked to fill.

Partnership as pedagogy. Beyond pairing and exclusivity, the Mortlach partnership operated as instruction. The maison’s distinctive 2.81-times distillation regime, and the patience-and-control discipline beneath it, was the conceptual framework I applied to my ageing programme. The Mortlach Room was the closest I had come, in twelve years of restaurant work, to building a room around a single discipline transmitted from outside it.

It is the third room-within-a-restaurant in my Restaurant Legacy — joining the Krug Chef’s Table at Enfin (April 2016) and the Hennessy Salon at Enfin (November 2016 onwards). Across the three rooms, the discipline is consistent: a single maison, a single discipline, a private salon within a public room. The Mortlach Room was the most architecturally precise of the three — built around a working ageing programme that translated the malt’s distillation discipline into my own.

The dedicated ager — programme architecture

At the operational centre of the Mortlach Room stood a dedicated dry-ageing cabinet — a single-zone counter unit by Precision (UK), fitted into custom cabinetry — that held my structured ageing programme across the room’s working life. The programme was not new. It was the Shin’Labo ageing discipline — by then a year and a half into its development — translated meat-specific. What Shin’Labo had been perfecting in protein since 2022 found its meat-led expression at MeatMore.

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

The cabinet held three ageing programmes in parallel — Whiskey, Butter, and Kombu — each tuned to a different kitchen tradition. The Whiskey programme honoured the Mortlach Room’s signature pairing. The Butter programme carried the European craft tradition. The Kombu programme connected MeatMore to the yōshoku dialogue that Shin’Labo carried across the same years. The protocols beneath the three programmes are held as house craft, not for public surfacing. The discipline belongs to the room; the technique is mine.

Beyond the ageing programmes, barrel wood from the maison was made available for smoking — a quiet circularity by which Mortlach’s terroir, having shaped the spirit, returned to shape the meat. Three programmes within the cabinet; one wood programme over the fire. Four programmes, one ager, one disciplined argument.

The closure (2024)

MeatMore closed in 2024. The dedicated Mortlach Room and the wider steakhouse format passed into historical record. The closure paired with Shin’Labo’s 2024 closure within the wider 2025-pivot window, following Enfin (Menara Hap Seng) and Bouchon Enfin in the wider story of restaurants I have closed.

What carried forward from MeatMore was the same thing that carried forward from each of the closed rooms: not the room itself, but the discipline the room had been built around. The ageing ladder, the pairing protocol, the Omotenashi operational standard, and the principle that the room can be built around a single transmitted discipline — these have travelled into the cultural-diplomacy work that carries forward today.

From the archive

A wider record of the room as it lived — table service, lighting, the room as it received its guests across the working life of the venue.