New laboratory

Shin'Labo, the new laboratory, opened in 2022 at Mitsui Shopping Park Lalaport KL. The name pairs Shin (true, new, heart) with Labo, a word that reads as "laboratory" in both French and Japanese. The cooking started from yōshoku and took it further, with French haute technique, luxury ingredients and Malaysian terroir. Traditional yōshoku reworked Western food through a Japanese lens for the everyday table. Shin'Labo reworked yōshoku itself to fine-dining standard. Our operating philosophy was Beneficial and Sustainable Gastronomy: the chef as a steward, and never merely an interpreter of the menu. The room worked on three levels at once, as a restaurant, a salon and a place for ambassadorial private dining.

The restaurant ran for nearly three years and closed in December 2024. It now belongs to the record of my fourteen years in restaurants. Tatler Asia, Robb Report Malaysia, FirstClasse, BURO 24/7, Lifestyle Asia and The Peak all wrote about the room. The Vibes reported the HAPA Awards hat-trick, Pin Prestige covered the Balvenie pairing dinners in Chinese, and Robb Report’s later coverage called the room where I did my Krug Ambassade work Ryoutei Shin’Labo, after the high-end Japanese tradition of private dining.

Here is the work as the press recorded it.

Identity, cuisine and launch, 2022

The early coverage set out what Shin’Labo was. Tatler Asia’s launch piece by Aaron Pereira (2022) covered the opening. FirstClasse called it “a culinary expression in both French and Japanese”. Lifestyle Asia KL described the cooking as “marrying Japanese cuisine with French cooking, elevated through local ingredients”. Robb Report Malaysia judged it to maison standard from the first review, and described yōshoku taken further with French technique and Malaysian ingredients.

A culinary expression in both French and Japanese.

FirstClasse · 2022

The cooking was never pure yōshoku. Traditional yōshoku (tonkatsu, omurice, hambāgu, korokke, Japanese curry) is the style Japan built in the late nineteenth century by reworking Western food through a Japanese lens for the everyday table. Shin’Labo started from that heritage and pushed it on. The conversation between Japan and the West stayed the same, but we cooked it with French haute technique, Caspian caviar, dry-aged duck, seasonal truffle and Krug Champagne pairings. The room brought yōshoku up to fine-dining standard.

The location at Mitsui Shopping Park Lalaport KL mattered. Travel & Leisure Asia’s coverage of the wider Mitsui retail concept (local produce, Malaysian indigenous ingredients, a Japanese retail philosophy) set Shin’Labo inside the same Japanese-Malaysian conversation the food was already having on the plate. The building said what the cooking said.

The three rooms: Shin’Kappou, Ryoutei and Maison du Caviar

We divided the 2,700-square-foot space at Lalaport BBCC into three distinct dining areas, each at a different level of intimacy.

Shin’Kappou, the main dining room. Guests watched me prepare multi-course menus at the counter using traditional kappou techniques: cutting, boiling, stewing, frying. The format was deliberately Japanese. The cooking was the show.

The Krug Chef’s Table, Ryoutei Shin’Labo. One of the few in the world, and the only one in Asia. The room hosted exclusive Krug Champagne pairings and my ongoing Ambassade work. Robb Report Malaysia placed it in the Japanese ryoutei (料亭) tradition of high-end private dining.

Maison du Caviar Caspienne, the caviar bar and lounge, built around top-tier sturgeon caviar sourced directly from heritage sites in the Caspian Sea.

The design: Swofinty, MUSE Gold and MIID Silver

I commissioned Swofinty, a local design firm, to turn the way we cooked into a working dining room. Their answer was a bold, minimal facade and a laboratory-inspired interior: sculptural lighting, lab cabinets, and the same restraint the kitchen was practising on the plate. The room went on to win international design recognition.

In 2022, the room received:

• MUSE Design Awards, Gold (2022), interior design. The international award recognised how Swofinty turned a transcendental dining concept into a physical room.
• MIID REKA Awards, Silver (2022), Food & Beverage category. This is the top award of the Malaysian Institute of Interior Designers, and it recognised Swofinty for translating my transcendental dining brief into space.

Two design awards in the opening year, and a HAPA hat-trick to follow across 2023 to 2024. Everything we cooked afterwards stood on the discipline the architecture had already set.

Signature dishes

Three dishes carried Shin’Labo through its years, each showing a different side of the cooking.

Bread of the Forest. An artistic appetiser composed to look like the forest floor, and typical of the experimental forms Shin’Labo kept to.

Binchotan Duck à l’Orange. Duck dry-aged in-house and seared over binchotan charcoal: a contemporary French dish with Modernist techniques, retold in the language of the Japanese kitchen.

Truffle Hayashi Rice. The signature comfort dish. Duck, onsen egg and seasonal truffles, plated to honour Japanese home cooking while bringing it up to fine-dining standard.

The oyster was the centre of Shin’Labo. More than any other dish, it showed what the restaurant was: Japanese ingredient, French technique and Malaysian terroir meeting at one point on the plate. It came back again and again over the years, the signature nobody needed to announce.

Reviews

The dining press kept returning to the quality of the ingredients, the Japanese-French idea and the feel of the room. BURO 24/7’s review of dinner, drinks and caviar at Shin’Labo by James Won described the room as cleanly as anyone did in all my kitchen years.

Tatler Asia’s second feature kept to the same standard: “the ingredients are undoubtedly premium […] a tantalising range of sake.” The Peak ran an On the Cover feature and later covered the launch of the Kikuyu Elevated Yōshoku Lunch Set (2022). Across the four pieces you see a kitchen that did not over-explain itself, and a press that understood what it was doing on first reading.

The HAPA Awards hat-trick

In 2022, The Vibes reported the result that put Shin’Labo on the formal record of Malaysian hospitality: a hat-trick at the HAPA Awards. The piece quoted me saying “a restaurant is only as good as its team”. The line appears here once and is not repeated, and it sums up the way of working that earned the recognition.

A restaurant is only as good as its team.

James Won · The Vibes (HAPA Awards hat-trick)

I keep the hat-trick low-key on this page. The recognition serves the work more than the person.

The team: a restaurant is only as good as its people

A team earned the hat-trick. The Shin’Labo brigade worked across the kappou counter, the French haute kitchen, the caviar bar and the Krug Chef’s Table. Each room had its own discipline, and each was run by people I trusted to keep to the standard it asked for.

The Cameron walk, before first service

Before the first service, the brigade walked the soil. Every member of the opening team (cooks, servers, sommelier) had to visit Uncle Leong’s biodynamic farm in Cameron Highlands before taking their place in the room at Lalaport. Biodynamic farming keeps the produce inside a closed loop: the soil is restored season after season, and planting follows the calendar of the land. To know the food, the team had to know the ground. It was a rite of formation, and never meant as a tour. Chef-steward, the phrase we used, meant asking the whole room to remember where the produce came from. You remember a place best by having stood in it.

The ageing library: protein ageing from the first day

From the day Shin’Labo opened in 2022, the art and science of ageing protein was at the centre of the work. The ageing library was the work itself, in slow form, and never an add-on. Over the three years it ran as one continuous programme: protein aged at temperature, against time and against what the season offered, all to a yōshoku standard.

The discipline travelled. When I opened MeatMore in October 2023 and built the Mortlach Room inside it, I did not invent a new ageing programme for that room. It was the Shin’Labo programme, by then a year and a half old, adapted for meat. Whisky, butter and kombu: three programmes in one cabinet at MeatMore, all built on what Shin’Labo had been laying down since opening day.

The Krug Room

Inside Shin’Labo, the Krug Chef’s Table was our resident Champagne room: a salon where I staged my ongoing Krug Ambassade work. Robb Report Malaysia’s later coverage called it Ryoutei Shin’Labo, after the Japanese ryoutei (料亭) tradition of high-end private dining.

The Krug Chef’s Table moved from Enfin (Menara Hap Seng) to Shin’Labo in February 2022, which made Shin’Labo, under the maison’s brand standard, home to Asia’s only Krug Chef’s Table. We poured Krug Grande Cuvée and Krug Rosé 26ème Édition for the Ambassade work and used the Pininfarina × Mepra × Chef James Won special edition exclusively. The Krug Music Pairing tradition carried on from where it began, at Enfin’s Krug Chef’s Table in April 2016.

Brand pairings and programmes

Much of my brand work happened at Shin’Labo while it was open.

The Macallan. The formal Dining Experience programme began on 15 February 2022 and ran for twenty-four months, to 14 February 2024, in three formats: the Whisky Dining Experience, a Cocktail Activation, and a Premium Spirit Activation across all three rooms. The limited-edition flagship was The Harmony Collection Rich Cacao, with Jordi Roca and Polly Logan, with an allocation of 94 bottles to Shin’Labo. At the 007 James Bond 60th Anniversary launch, Shin’Labo was named one of six authorised establishments in KL.

Mortlach. The launch (September 2022), before the dedicated Mortlach Room moved to MeatMore (29 August 2023 to 2024).

The Balvenie. The PinPalate pairing dinners, covered by Pin Prestige in Chinese, with Caribbean Cask, Port Wood and aged-statement releases (April to May 2022).

Glenfiddich. The Grand Yozakura 29-Year-Old activation, where the maison’s Japan-finished Speyside whisky met Shin’Labo’s Japanese-French cooking.

Louis XIII. The 2022 activation that put T’lur Malaysian caviar at the centre of a global Louis XIII pairing for the first time. The campaign, Les Voyages du Caviar, ran from April to June 2022.

BMW. The electrified menu designed for the BMW i7 launch.

Mepra. Used exclusively at Shin’Labo for as long as it was open. No other restaurant in Malaysia served on the maison’s flatware.

Location and concept

Mitsui Shopping Park Lalaport KL is a retail concept run by Mitsui in Bukit Bintang City Centre. Travel & Leisure Asia’s coverage described the setting: local produce, Malaysian indigenous ingredients, a Japanese retail philosophy and a Japanese-Malaysian building. Placing Shin’Labo there was deliberate. A Japanese-Malaysian mall was home to a Japanese-French-Malaysian kitchen, and that fit was how we chose to work.

Shin’Labo on the road

Now and then I took the room elsewhere. The best documented night is the Anantara Desaru pop-up of 1 December 2022, a one-night residency at Sea. Fire. Salt Restaurant in Anantara Desaru Coast Resort & Villas, on the east coast of Johor. I plated a six-course Japanese-French menu built around the senses for that single evening, with the same discipline and restraint, in a room by the sea that was not mine for the night.

That is the first Shin’Labo evening away from home I would put on this page. Any others were cooked to the same standard and on the same terms.

Films: the showreel and selected shorts

A short visual record of the room: a showreel and a selection of YouTube Shorts filmed while it was open.

The wider Shorts archive: twelve more short films, grouped by what each one captured.

Krug × Lemon, the Single Ingredient series:

• Celebrating the Krug Single Ingredient, Buro
• Celebrating the Krug Single Ingredient, FirstClasse
• Celebrating the Krug Single Ingredient, Grazia
• Celebrating the Krug Single Ingredient, L’officiel

Shin’Labo experiences, maison pairings:

• Shin’Labo × Krug, the experience
• Shin’Labo × Mortlach, the experience
• Shin’Labo × Macallan, the experience
• Shin’Labo × Louis XIII, the experience
• Shin’Labo at Anantara Desaru, the room on the road

Cuisine philosophy:

• Shin’Labo by James Won, cuisine philosophy
• Shin’Labo by James Won, cuisine philosophy

Mother’s Menu:

• Shin’Labo by James Won, Mother’s Menu celebrations

The 2024 closure and what came next

Shin’Labo closed in December 2024. It was part of a deliberate move away from running restaurants and towards conservation and culinary diplomacy. That move took shape the following year, when the Serumpun Sarawak movement made its first international appearance, at Seaside Studio CASO in Osaka.

The closure was a turning point for me. The discipline came with me into a larger room: first the Mulu rainforest, then the wider state of Sarawak, and then the Sarawak Cultural Village succession of April 2026.