Of innovation

Restaurant Kin Kin
40 Jalan Dewan Sultan Sulaiman 1,
(Off Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman)
Kuala Lumpur

So much of the productivity in the culinary world comes through imitation. Chefs the world over are continually learning from the dishes and techniques of other chefs, or other cuisines. To be sure, specific recipes and formulations are closely guarded, but I can’t think of many other enterprises where the sharing of intellectual property is as unfettered (and as un-priced or unregulated). This imitation is most prevalent in Asian hawker fare, where successful dishes are reverse-engineered and replicated until they become staples of the food scene. I can think of a few examples, like cereal prawns and Marmite pork ribs.

So it is a momentous occasion when that rare innovation occurs in the hawker scene, when someone creates a new dish that is quite unlike any other (and in the process spawning his or her own wave of imitators). A recent trip to KL – a veritable mecca for hawker fare – yielded just such a discovery: chili pan mee (辣椒板面) at Restaurant Kin Kin.

A group of us made the drive up to KL over the long weekend, and tried this place on the recommendation of a couple of locals who were serious foodies. Typically, when word-of-mouth recommendations are passed between foodies – it’s hard to avoid drawing comparisons. These comparisons can be drawn across cuisines (“It’s like a Chinese version of spaghetti bolognaise.”), across dishes (“It’s a mix of Hokkien noodles and char kway teow.”) or in reference to other versions of the same dish (“It’s similar to the one in MacPherson, but they use more sweet sauce for this one.”). However, the person who recommended this place to us was at a loss for comparisons. “I don’t know how to describe it to you”, he said, “Just try it – it’s a life-changing experience.”

So we packed ourselves into two taxis and ventured forth for a late Saturday lunch. Kin Kin is located in one of the last places you would expect to find good food – one in a row of shophouses ranging from auto shops to goodness knows what else, on a sleepy side street off the main drag in the Chow Kit area. As it was a Saturday, most of the other shops along the stretch were closed, and the only hustle of human activity emanated from Kin Kin, making it easy to locate. It was about 3pm in the afternoon – well after normal lunch hours – but the place was still crowded. Surely a good sign.

Kin Kin is a dusty, humid store in a dusty, humid city (the lack of ventilation becomes crucial once you realise that spice – the kind of sweat-inducing, lip-numbing spice – is what makes their signature dish so good). There really isn’t anything you can say about its décor, apart from the fact that the ceramic wall tiles are adorned with messages hand-written in permanent marker. These messages range from proclamations that there are no other (legitimate) branches, to warnings not to even attempt to steal the house-made chili paste. Curiously enough, they are written in a faltering English, which in itself is sometimes hilarious, but must also be taken to mean that this place enjoys a significant tourist clientele (or that tourists are more likely to make off with the chili paste).

When I say that the chili pan mee is a dish unlike any other, I might be exaggerating slightly. 板面, loosely translated as “board noodles” since they refer to flat flour noodles (like fettucine), has come to represent another dish that is typically served in soup, together with minced meat, mushrooms and deep-fried anchovies (ikan bilis). The version at Kin Kin does come with all those ingredients – but is served dry, with the addition of a poached egg on top. The piece de resistance, however, is the loose paste of chili flakes that is placed on each table. What you are supposed to do is to add however much chili you can handle to your bowl, then mix it together with the noodles and other ingredients. The runny yolk of the poached egg helps to incorporate everything, and the end result is something that looks like spaghetti bolognaise.


It tastes completely different, though. The best part of Kin Kin’s chili pan mee, in my opinion, is the noodles. Springy to the bite and cooked to perfection, they belie the fact that all that went into their creation was probably just eggs, flour and water. The other star is, of course, the chili paste. From the dark intense colour of the paste, I expected an overpowering flavour. What I got was something just shy of that – something that still allowed for the subtle tastes of the other ingredients to shine through without overpowering them. Yet the chili still had an intense flavour of its own, a sort of umami that defied description.

There are many things you have to put up with if you want to eat at Kin Kin, where the balance of power is most decidedly not with the customer. You have to wait – a combination of it being always crowded and the production process being slow – up to 30 or 40 minutes for your food. Service is almost non-existent and the staff operate on their own terms – meaning that they will get to you when they can and want to. Then there are the spartan and stuffy surroundings, which do not exactly inspire confidence in their hygiene levels. But these failings, which might be death blows for any other establishment, are only minor inconveniences to be suffered willingly here at Kin Kin. The quality of their product (and the reasonableness of their price) makes everything worthwhile.

On the drive back Laura remarked that after trying this, and other hawker specialties during the trip – she remained unconvinced that KL had the variety of hawker fare to challenge, say, Taiwan. She pointed to a greater variety of foods and snacks in Taiwan, and a greater variety of treatments, as evidence of a more innovative food culture. She may be right, or her allegiances may be due to the fact that she is from there; and I personally haven’t eaten enough in Taiwan to speak intelligently on the subject. Either way I think we can agree to celebrate innovation when we see it, and Kin Kin is certainly a good example.

Travel log: Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia)

I recently came back from a weekend trip to Kuala Lumpur (KL), which must have shaved a few years off my life. Nothing screams living in the moment more than binge drinking and indiscriminate consumption of unhealthy but delicious foods. Unfortunately for me that sounds like an apt description of much of my life.

KL is a popular destination for Singapore foodies, especially those in search of richer, more authentic hawker food. We set off for the trip armed with recommendations of what to eat, and over the three days and two nights it felt as though I was continually ingesting either food or drink. By the end I felt like I had aged considerably – such was our excess – but it was worth it, and then some.

Yet after all that it would be hard for me to say that KL food is better than Singapore’s; the stand-outs were, of course, memorable, but there was the odd mediocre dish. I didn’t eat enough to compare the average standards, so there is nothing left to do but make a second trip! And third, and fourth trips, of course.

Overseas Restoran (海外天)

Located near the fringes of the busy Bukit Bintang area, this sleepy little Chinese restaurant was the first stop we made, and filled us with nothing but excitement and anticipation for the rest of the trip. We arrived just a little bit before they opened for dinner, and walked in to see the waiters and cooks having their staff meal in a corner of the restaurant. They welcomed us with gracious smiles, apologised for not being ready to serve anyone yet, and asked if we were willing to sit down and drink some tea while waiting for the kitchen to start up again. Their inviting manner won us over, and we settled down for what became a leisurely wait for our food.

The roast meats are the specialty at Overseas Restoran – whose name became all the more appropriate when the waiter told us that the bulk of their business came not from locals but from out-of-towners coming in from Singapore and Hong Kong for a taste of their famous char siew. We had to get an order of that, and also picked the roast duck, but not before we opened our palates with a helping of herbal soup.


This was the char siew. Unbelievably fatty, and coated with a syrupy glaze of barbeque sauce. Clearly the concept of carcinogens had not entered the consciousness of the kitchen, for the exterior was covered in delicious black char. I got the same feeling as I did when I was dining at 2941 in DC and eating Mishima beef. Back then, I remember thinking that I was swallowing butter instead of chewing into muscle fibre – such was the tenderness of the beef – and also concluding that comparing it to normal beef was just inappropriate. This was in a whole different category. The same thing applied to the char siew at Overseas Restoran – it did not fit the preconceptions of char siew that I had, and as such comparison was unfair. It was very, very good though.


But the true star was the roast duck. I could not explain why and how this was so good. The exterior wasn’t crispy like how I usually like it; the meat was not tough, but yet not overly marbled with fat. But it was exquisitely seasoned, and everything was just done perfectly to create amazing bite-sized bursts of flavour and texture. I racked my brain to figure out what it was that was so special about the roast duck and still could not come up with an answer. I think sometimes you don’t have to have perfect technique, or execute everything with such precision; sometimes a dish cooked with care, and with the selfless conviction of providing pleasure to the diner can result in a very tasty meal indeed.

Wong Ah Wah

Our next stop for Part 2 of dinner that night was Jalan Alor, formerly the red light district but now a street of outdoor food stalls and restaurants. The “mamak stalls” never cease to amaze me – the entire workstation, including the stove top, is usually no wider than the armspan of an average person. And yet, standing in front of the stall and in all probability not moving his feet for the entire duration of the night, the average hawker can whip up a variety of meats, noodle dishes, vegetables. Jalan Alor is alive in the sense that you can feel the hunger in the air – the hunger of the people there who are in search of good food, on the cheap, in bustling, ramshackle environments. They just want to eat, and eat well.

(Just as an aside, why is it that all the good food always sprouts up around the red light districts, especially in Asian cities at least?)


These are the BBQ chicken wings at Wong Ah Wah at the end of Jalan Alor. The perfect marinate of honey and soy sauce, cooked over a charcoal fire. I thought they were delicious, but then again I think all wings are delicious. Buffalo wings, teriyaki wings, barbeque wings, they’re all good.


In the middle is spicy la-la, and in the foreground is kang kong. There is absolutely no combination like spicy food and cold beer. It is one of life’s greatest pleasures. I feel for people who do not eat spicy food, because they will never get to experience the immense satisfaction in numbing your taste buds with searing heat, before cooling them down with an ice cold beer. You don’t even need good beer, in fact the beer should in fact preferably be cheap and light. Just thinking about that combination makes me hungry.

Sek Yuen

For dinner the next night we went to Sek Yuen, another recommendation for good Cantonese tze char cuisine. Now this place is something else. It is legitimately stuck in a decade from long ago. And when I say long ago, I mean it. The restaurant takes up two shophouses, and one is clearly a later addition – it looks cleaner and is actually air-conditioned. But it is the other that I recommend eating at, for an experience tinged with history.

The feeling you get at Sek Yuen, apart from that of stepping into a time warp, is one of going to someone’s house for dinner. The staff all have that motherly/fatherly/grandmotherly/grandfatherly look, and are constantly scurrying around trying to anticipate your needs, as if you were a visitor from afar who had dropped in unannounced in hopes of a good meal. There is no menu, so you order what you want to eat, and if they can accommodate you they will. It is an interesting concept, and one that I wanted to take advantage of. But I figured that since it was our first (and only) time at the place, we should defer decision-making responsibility to the kitchen, and order what they felt to be their own specialties.


This place really should be a National Heritage Site of some sort.

You know the food is good when it is all gone and you realise that you have forgotten to take pictures. This is the only one I managed to snap, of the deep-fried garoupa in sweet and sour sauce - after we had devoured it, of course.


The standouts here include the fish dish that we had, and also a Cantonese staple of braised pork with yam slices. My mother loves this dish because when she first moved in with my dad and his family, this was one of the first dishes she ate that she had never tried before. My dad’s family’s maidservant at the time made this dish particularly well, and to this day it brings back fond memories for my mom, of her newly-wed days and the initial pages of what was a new chapter in her life. For my part I just like to eat it, so I am happy when anybody makes it for me. It is deceptively difficult to do well, just like all Chinese food, so when I find a good version I make a mental note of it.

We had a lot of other stops along the way too, but these I felt were the standouts. Perhaps I shall continue this in time to come, with a write-up of the other places we visited in KL. For now, I would recommend these places as must-tries for any visitor to KL.