KUALA LUMPUR, July 12 — Standing over white-hot coals, Lau Ka Hong often cuts a reserved and aloof figure.
The 34-year-old chef and co-founder of Atelier Binchotan spends most of his time with his back to diners, though he insists it’s not in his nature to be so withdrawn from them.
Even when he faces the counter while preparing a dish on the pass, his laser-focused gaze rarely shifts from the task at hand.
You might get a smile when he serves your food. “It’s not that I don’t like talking (to diners). I just don’t have time to talk,” he says.
His wife, Celine Choong, who opened and runs the restaurant with him, chimes in. “If he does, something will burn.”
Together, the husband and wife team opened Atelier Binchotan back in 2020. Neither predicted — or planned — for the restaurant to one day become one of the hottest seats in Kuala Lumpur, with reservations sometimes full for months at a time.
“At the very beginning, we just wanted to do a cafe,” says Choong, 31. “Every day I tarik the coffee and stand by, and I was boiling liong sui too.”
Curiously, the cafe was still going to carry the same name and feature open-fire cooking.
“I was not happy with the name, I’ll tell you that. We were going to do open-fire cooking; all the proteins were going to come with the same garnish, a salad and mashed potatoes.”
Looking back, the couple acknowledges, in good humour, the peculiar nature of their initial plan. But it was all they wanted after years of working in some of the most demanding kitchens and dining rooms in Singapore.
A native of Batu Pahat, Johor, Lau left for Singapore immediately after graduating from culinary school.
“I started at The Fullerton Bay Hotel. I spent half a year at the poolside bar there, and then I transferred to the French brasserie for the rest of the year,” he recalls. “That’s when I started to learn more about French technique, and history, then I moved to Robuchon.”
Lau spent two years at the Joël Robuchon Restaurant, which was Singapore’s sole three-Michelin-starred restaurant at the time. “I was a commis there, and after one year I got promoted to chef de partie,” he adds. “In the second year (2013), Celine joined.”
Despite meeting his future wife there, Lau didn’t stay for long. He joined another illustrious kitchen in Restaurant André, where he spent four years working under acclaimed Taiwanese chef André Chiang.
During his time there, Lau worked alongside the likes of Kenneth Foong, who’s now the head chef of Noma; Zor Tan, whose restaurant Born ranked 25th on Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants 2024; and Johanne Siy, the head chef at Lolla who was named Asia’s Best Female Chef in 2023.
When Restaurant André closed in early 2018, Lau joined Keirin Buck’s Le Bon Funk as sous chef, which he credits with expanding his cooking horizons.
“Le Bon Funk really changed my cooking direction. It showed (me) that it’s not only in fine dining that you can enjoy high-level, high-quality food,” he explains, with regards to swapping fine dining for a more casual restaurant like Le Bon Funk. “You can get high-level cooking with quality ingredients at a reasonable price, and the service is more friendly.”
Choong echoes this sentiment, though her journey working front-of-house in Singapore is quite different from Lau’s — the Joël Robuchon Restaurant was her first job.
“Zero experience. I never studied hospitality, I was just trying my luck and dropped my resumé at any outlet,” says the Ipoh native. “That same day, HR called me to arrange an interview. So I looked at my cousin like, ‘What is this?’ My cousin was like, ‘Eh this one very atas you know! Go! Go! Go!’ So I went... the French manager interviewed me — very leng zai.”
She jokes about it now but admits to struggling with the requirements of the job. “I don’t even know what caviar, or foie gras is. It was three months of nightmares; I was just carrying food in and out, ‘Oui chef, oui chef’ every single day,” she explains. “From Robuchon, I went to Marina Bay Sands, then Raffles Hotel as well. It was all fine dining.”
“That’s why I told him (Lau), no more fine dining. I am so tired of it. Now, I can talk to my customers more casually, more happily.” Choong adds.
Lau hadn’t thought it through yet but began to consider a restaurant of his own. “After André, I thought about opening something in Malaysia,” he says before Choong quickly cuts in. “And I killed the idea because I didn’t want to come back.”
The couple were unwilling to swap their relative financial stability in Singapore to take the leap back home, but life... found a way.
“We got married and then I was pregnant,” Choong says about deciding to return. “Then we didn’t really have a choice, because we wanted to be closer to family.”
Both resigned at the end of November 2019 and were back in Malaysia by December. They settled on opening the restaurant in KL, but there were concerns.
“They (their families) were worried, especially financially,” Choong explains. “We got married, had a baby, decided to come back, then we opened a place, all the money is like... kosong our bank.”
Even more uncertainty followed in the coming months. “Then MCO happened, and then I delivered in 2020,” Choong recalls.
“When we could open again, we spent many days just looking at each other, making porridge for ourselves to eat in the empty restaurant.”
Eventually, they lurched away from this cold limbo, and the flames that adorn Lau’s grill came alive again — thanks largely to the mini pork burger that’s become their calling card.
“The burger is the only dish still on the menu from day one,” says Lau. “I didn’t expect it to become this; it actually started as a sausage.”
“One day the casing broke, and the filling came out, so I just decided to grill it as a patty,” he explains, with Choong adding that it reminded both of them of Le Burger from their days at Joël Robuchon.
“I also started thinking about the pulled pork sanger from Burnt Ends, and the beef tongue sandwich at Le Bon Funk.” Interestingly, the latter utilises sauce gribiche, the same French cold egg sauce that Lau would end up using for his mini burger.
Choong is animated in expressing the importance of this burger to Atelier Binchotan. “This burger... this burger has paid our salaries and rentals... all the bills lah!”
In April this year, the restaurant closed to move to a new location — just one street over, still in Taman Desa.
“The landlord changed at our old place, someone new bought the building,” says Choong. “We still like this area, and we live nearby, and he (Lau) didn’t want to leave it.”
The temporary closure gave Lau lots of time and space to think about the menu, a luxury that wasn’t afforded to him four years ago.
“I had no idea what to put on the menu, I had too many things to do for the restaurant and had no time to relax my brain,” Lau recalls about opening back in 2020.
“This menu took a lot of inspiration from my time in Bali — the award-winning restaurant Locavore in particular. Babi guling was also the initial inspiration for the pork chop dish, but sucking pig would've been too expensive,” he explained.
In its final iteration, the pork chop is grilled with a thick fat cap intact and is the lightest shade of pink from edge to edge. It’s served with fermented bitter gourd — inspired by classic Chinese stir-fried bitter gourd and pork — and a wild garlic leaf pesto which incorporates the titular herb and pine nuts with lemongrass, shallots, torch ginger flower and kaffir lime leaf, mashing up pesto and sambal matah together.
In another dish, slices of cuttlefish are gently grilled till tender and served with lily bulbs and a soursop dressing.
“I think molluscs and fruit go very well together; we’ve tried this with rambutan as well,” Lau remarks. “At Restaurant André, there was his octo-philosophy, one part of it was called “south” and it often featured seafood and fruits. There’s quite some influence from him here.”
Lau is drawn to open-fire cooking for a number of reasons. “I try to keep the combinations uncomplicated, straightforward and without too many fancy garnishes,” he says, feeling that food cooked over an open flame can best express the original flavour of an ingredient.
It also touches back on another part of André Chiang’s octo-philosophy that influenced him. “‘Pure’ is another one; we want to keep the original flavour of these ingredients, so there isn’t a lot of additional stuff.”
Like most chefs, Lau is keen to stretch his creative wings when creating dishes — but he trusts his wife and partner to rein him in. Choong says the balance between what customers want and his creativity should be split “70/30”, though Lau jokes that it’s closer to “80/20”.
When asked about how he finds the balance, he laughs, saying, “I have no balance! When I come up with a dish, I have to pass it to my government (Choong) for approval. Then only will it make the menu.”
But when asked what separates Atelier Binchotan from the rest, and what they’re most proud of, the duo’s answer was a surprising one. “I think one thing: humanity,” says Choong.
The response might elicit an eye-roll from some, but she says it so matter-of-factly it doesn’t feel like a cheap emotional ploy. “Our customer base, 50 per cent or even more, are regulars. We build relationships with our customers and then we become friends.”
Relationships are what they believe to be their strength. “We’re really proud of the relationships with our team, customers and suppliers,” Lau says. “Seeing some of them (the team) get married, having girlfriends — and our staff turnover rate is quite low. Maybe it’s because we have three days off!”
Choong feels strongest thinking about the relationship at the heart of Atelier Binchotan. “That’s really our strength here: he takes care of the kitchen, and I take care of the front-of-house. And we won’t leave each other.”
Atelier Binchotan 備長炭坊
5, Jalan 1/109e, Taman Desa Business Park, 58100 Kuala Lumpur, Wilayah Persekutuan Kuala Lumpur
Open Thursday to Sunday, 11.30am-3.30pm, 6-10pm. Open only for dinner on Thursdays.
Tel: 017-788 9096
Web: https://www.atelierbinchotan.com/
Instagram: @atelier_binchotan
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