A: To be honest, when I’m eating at home, I eat almost like a vegetarian. Not for any health or religious reasons but mostly because I just love and enjoy vegetables. I also have a few vegan friends and they’re always having difficulty finding places to eat with their non-veggie friends. We actually started to make a vegan/vegetarian menu because of the Jay Festival a few years ago. The Kin Jay Festival is a nationwide vegetarian celebration that lasts for a month where many non veggie places will offer veggie options. Since I love eating vegetarian food, Top and I decided to challenge ourselves and create a 7-course vegetarian/vegan tasting menu specially for this festival. The feedback from diners was so great, we decided to do it all year round.
A: Working with Top was actually not all that difficult. We’d already worked together before when we first met in Singapore and again while we were doing pop ups before opening MIA. I think one of the reasons things came easy was due to our compatibility. Top is more of the creative type and I’m more organised, making a good partnership for running a restaurant. We also have similar backgrounds in terms of our training and are both Asian chefs who started our careers doing classical French cooking, making it easy for us to relate to each other and having similar taste preferences.
A: I think that for me, Sarawak Laksa represents the taste of my childhood. It is a dish that is almost only ever available back home and reminds me of Kuching. I find that the taste itself is so unique and unlike any other noodle soup dish and that’s why I love it so much. I think Sarawak Laksa in Kuching in general, is pretty good no matter where you try it but always go for the kopitiams!
A: Rockpool 1989 (now closed), is a place that is very close to my heart. It was the first fine dining restaurant I ever worked in and also one of the first fine dining establishments I’ve ever dined in. When eating there, I was awed by not the food but the level of service and it really made me want to work in fine dining. As of right now, I have no plans to open anything in Kuching.
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