KAJANG, July 27 — If you are a child of the 80s, you might remember gamebooks such as Lone Wolf or the aptly titled series, Choose Your Own Adventure.
How often does one get to relive one’s growing-up years with a similar “choose your own adventure” experience in a café?
That’s the somewhat nostalgic situation we found ourselves in when we visited BTW Coffee & Bites in Kajang. The two-level shop was hidden in a neighbourhood filled with manufacturing plants and car workshops; not exactly where you'd expect to find coffee, cake or adventure.
Yet that’s exactly what we discovered.
We picked up one menu card (more on what these are later): Sweet Potato Balls sounded safe and fun. What arrived minutes later (cooked to order) were the typical golden orbs of Taiwanese style dìguā qiú, albeit dusted liberally with “snow”.
A surprise, certainly.
Less of a surprise is how the shop is also home to a roastery called KYN Coffee Craft; a common theme with many coffee micro-roasters nowadays.
KYN Coffee Craft was founded by Gyn Koo and Ivyn Lim in 2018. The young couple positions their roastery in the affordable coffee category, which might explain a plethora of blends — a whimsical direction for a specialty coffee purveyor when the trend veers towards single origin beans.
Their café, BTW Coffee & Bites, serves food in addition to an expansive coffee menu. The fun part is how customers are invited to select from a hook board of menu cards. Each card is a different beverage or dish, ranging from small bites (hence the name) to mini donburi and pastas.
One might enjoy some Roasted Sesame Chicken Karaage or some Salted Egg Tempura Prawn Pasta — and still have space leftover for desserts (yes, plural).
The shelves behind the bar are agreeably stocked with a profusion of coffee brewing equipment. One is tempted by beverages such as a Cold Brew Affogato or an Iced Black Melon.
Yet sometimes a simple latte is all you need. (They have that too, fortunately.)
Those looking to buy coffee beans will similarly have plenty of options to choose from though, as mentioned earlier, most are blends. Koo and Lim focus quite a bit on design here, with “adaptations” of famous paintings for different blends.
Two of the packaging covers pay homage to the Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci. "Lisa” is, of course, the famous Mona Lisa, while “Cecilia” is an ode to da Vinci’s “The Lady with an Ermine”, a portrait of Cecilia Gallerani.
A personal favourite (the artwork, I mean) is “The Girl with a Pearl Earring” by Johannes Vermeer. This Dutch Golden Age painting is immortalised, after a fashion, in KYN’s “Margareta” coffee bag cover.
Are the flavour profiles of these signature blends inspired guesses as to the tastes of these iconic ladies? “Lisa” is a cacao-centric blend of Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia; “Cecilia” has notes of dark chocolate (Brazil and El Salvador); "Margareta” is a toffee-ish trinity of Brazil, El Salvador and Ethiopia.
You might notice there are a lot of Brazil beans being employed here. KYN’s Brazilian coffee comes from Minas Gerais State, the epicentre of the Brazilian coffee industry.
As such, it will come as no surprise that the roast profile of these beans tends to lean closer to medium dark. This is perhaps designed to appeal to their target audience, be it customers from the neighbourhood or wholesale accounts of other cafés that they supply too.
The lesson here might be to think outside the box. By focusing on a previously underserved neighbourhood, Koo and Lim created their own market and grew an audience for their style of coffee.
Which might take getting used to if one customarily prefers lighter roasts. As we sipped our pour over coffee, we realised it worked well with the sweet potato balls.
A lighter brew might be overwhelmed by the shower of dessicated coconut - yes, that’s what the “dusting of snow” turned out to be! - whereas this stronger cuppa makes for a perfect pairing.
Coconut or snow, for a moment there the illusion was breathtaking. I guess this is what you get when you go for a “choose your own adventure” experience: You never know what you’re going to get or what the journey might be like.
Or in the words of Dr. Seuss: “Oh, the places you will go!”
Café: BTW Coffee & Bites
20, Jalan P2/13, Seksyen 2, 20, Jalan P2/13, Bandar Teknologi Kajang, Selangor
IG: https://www.instagram.com/btw.coffeenbites/
FB: https://www.facebook.com/btwcoffeebites/
Roastery: KYN Coffee Craft
Same address as café above
Web: https://www.kyncoffee.com/
IG: https://www.instagram.com/kyncoffeecraft/
FB: https://www.facebook.com/kyncoffeecraft/
* This is an independent review where the writer paid for the meal.
* Follow us on Instagram @eatdrinkmm for more food gems.
