How Malaysian chef Darren Teoh took Dewakan from a restaurant in a university to 2 Michelin stars in KL

When Darren Teoh opened Dewakan at the ground floor of a university outside of Kuala Lumpur in 2014, Malaysia’s diners were in two camps: It would either be a brilliant success or amble into the tropical jungle of bad ideas.

The name Dewakan is an abbreviation of two Malay words — “dewa”, which means god, and “makan” which means to eat. Its premise was intriguing: To plate up indigenous produce for the fine dining table, at fine dining prices.

This was a time when Malaysians associated these ingredients with traditional, rootsy affairs. Think how people are far more familiar with the taste and texture of portobello mushrooms, than then would be with ‘cendawan kukur’ (split gill mushrooms) despite it being native or endemic to the region. It didn’t help that the restaurant was on the ground floor of a university and faced a football field, giving it the aura of an academic experiment.

“It was a crazy idea, but I was also at the point where I was bored of just teaching,” he said laughing, referring to the period where he taught culinary arts to students at Kolej Damansara Utama (KDU). “I wanted to look at the interesting landscape that we have and produce some really interesting food.”

That was 10 years ago. The Dewakan of today has blown naysayers out of the water, earned itself two Michelin stars and grown into a formidable pacesetter in KL and beyond. The price of the tasting menu in February 2024 goes from RM828.25 (S$234; US$174) while drink pairings start from RM202 going up to RM343. The menu sits at the highest tier of the Malaysian dining scene and even so, there’s a steady stream of locals and tourists alike eager to fill up its tables.

Such is the pulling power of Malaysia’s most important restaurant at the moment. The journey here has been arduous yet rewarding. Teoh’s is the tale of an underdog whose food speaks the language of the winds of the nation’s landscapes, that of lush rainforests teeming with ripe fruit, of streams, rivers and blue seas that crash into islets, and all the flora and fauna that lay between.

THE GENESIS OF AN IDEA

The Malaysian chef attributes his initial allure of these native ingredients largely to an affinity for indigenous cultures.

“It has something to do with my lack of identity. I come from a mixed parentage, and I speak neither languages,” he explained, referring to his part Chinese and part Indian heritage. “I don't have much of a culture except for the ones that I've taken from one generation before.”

While Malaysia’s ethnic makeup of the Malay, Chinese and Indian communities dominate the country’s narrative, there is also a large Orang Asli population that, while diverse, have an intimate cultural relationship with the land.

According to The International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, these communities make up 13.8 per cent of the 32 million national population in 2017, which encompasses peninsular Malaysia as well as the states of Sabah and Sarawak located 640km across the South China Sea on the northern part of Borneo.

This heterogenous segment of the population is immensely diverse, and each of the 95 subgroups has its own language, culture and customary land practices. It includes everyone from the negrito Orang Semang who call the mountainous and northern forest regions home to the nomadic, seafaring Sama-Bajau of Sabah.

THE FRENCH FORMATIVE YEARS

This respect was always something at the back of his mind through his formative years.It lay dormant through school and even as life and his career brought him to a path he never expected. He graduated from hospitality school and soon embarked on a career search. One of his lecturers knew Emmanuel Stroobant who was running Saint Pierre in the early days and before long, Teoh was in the kitchen for a one-day stage which, in his words, “was one of the most impactful days of my life.”

It jumpstarted Teoh’s career and years as a young chef sharpening his knives through French cuisine.

“I was completely clueless, completely out of depth, but I was like a kid in a candy store,” he chuckled. “It was 2001, Saint Pierre was still at Havelock Road, and I remember the exhilaration of the service, and looking at all the fancy dishes that the restaurant was putting out.”

That one-day experience spurred him to start looking for jobs in Singapore’s fine dining restaurants and Les Amis, which now has three Michelin stars, took him under its wings. There, he learnt some of the most foundational skills every chef needed, from washing and cutting ingredients to preparing elements for the chef de partie of the fish station to start cooking.

It wasn’t until the group transferred Teoh to Sebastien’s Bistro, a small French restaurant on Greenwood Avenue that his mastery of French cooking and operating a professional kitchen really took off.

“The food there was just, like, phenomenal,” he exclaimed. “It’s really good, tasty, French fare and nearly everything was made from scratch. For example, one batch of onion soup was 20kg of onions so that means I had to peel, slice and caramelise it all by hand and when that’s done you start that process all over again.”

Compared to Les Amis, he had to work at breakneck speed. “The restaurant sat 30 diners and for lunch you do 60 covers, at dinner maybe 90,” he says. The work was gruelling, but Teoh looks back with satisfaction as he was proud of the food they served up. “The kitchen was the size of two small cars but the work that we put in was amazing. We would even hand cut potatoes into wedges and deep fry it in duck fat ourselves.”

THE BEGINNINGS OF DEWAKAN

The French streak continued at Au Jardin, at E J H Corner House for another two years, before eventually, he decided to head back to Kuala Lumpur where he went into teaching for some eight years.

“The university allowed me to bide my time. It was an age of discovery when I opened a food tour company, a catering for special events company, food consultancy,” he says. “All these prepared me for the part of Dewakan that I wasn’t prepared for, which was the business side of it.”

He also completed his MBA in Switzerland, and he had a few weeks left on his student visa which would allow him to stage at Noma in Copenhagen, the multiple time holder of being the number one restaurant on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants annual list. The establishment is renowned for conceiving New Nordic cuisine which highlights the edible local landscapes of Copenhagen through sourcing locally and foraging.

“At that time, I was like, ‘wow these guys are nuts’,” said Teoh. “They were doing all these interesting stuff like juicing vegetables a-la-minute for the freshness.”

Beyond just using local ingredients, it was the ethos of the kitchen team that made a lasting impact. “What I took back from Noma was not to be afraid of doing things, of making mistakes,” he said.

That was when his admiration for the indigenous communities’ relationship with the land and his experience as a chef collided.

Dewakan — the restaurant which serves up indigenous produce overlooked by the fine dining class in preference for imported goods — was born.

BLAZING HIS OWN PATH

“There's so much about this country that we have so little knowledge of, and it felt like a tremendous waste,” said the chef. “There’s a giant vacuum in the way we treat our local produce, and nobody seems to be taking this culinary route.”

Being a pioneer means having to walk a path that none have come before. Teoh and his new team at Dewakan had to learn this the hard way. The main problem: There were no suppliers for these ingredients.

“We could only use what we could get with what we had access to at the time,” he explained. Much of it was focused on ulam, a universe of roots, leaves, flowers and fruit native to Malaysia. “A lot of it was stuff we got from a Malay store at Taman Tun market, and the lady — her name was Aziza — was a wealth of wisdom who would tell you the difference between daun salam and seri kayu, which refers to the same plant but different parts of the plant.”

Getting ingredients from the market to the restaurant meant he had to load up his motorcycle and make the trip each time supplies were running low.

In these early days, some of the first dishes served to guests were the result of using only what they could get. Local prawns were served with pucuk paku (fiddlehead ferns), pegaga (pennywart) and a drop of bunga telang (butterfly pea) oil. Elsewhere on the menu, the goreng pisang (fried banana fritters) ice cream was a hit amongst its early diners, a dessert that was at least familiar.

“The restaurant’s ambitions back then and where the local dining scene was not congruent,” said Teoh. “We had to dial back a little bit on who we thought we are, to what would get us bums on seats.”

While goreng pisang ice cream might seem simple, it revealed the meticulous understanding of the business of restaurants as much as the building blocks of flavour and texture in any single ingredient.

In an interview with Timeout Kuala Lumpur, Teoh spoke of the goreng pisang: “There are two things in it. One is the batter that’s been fried up, that becomes the emulsifier, and also some oil, which the pisang soaks up when it fries. So, the oil gives you the creamy mouthfeel, that’s why our ice creams are so smooth.

DEWAKAN, NOW

That approach of deconstructing the qualities of a common food item like goreng pisang is one that he carries out to this day, especially since his dishes require ingredients never been used in fine dining.

Dewakan is now located on the 48th floor of Naza Tower, a swanky address that comes replete with a massive open kitchen where a small army of chefs work in concert to orchestrate an elaborate meal.

Every diner who visits the restaurant will be taken on a tour of the kitchen before being treated to a demonstration of some of the ingredients the restaurant now uses. Depending on availability, guests will be able to see, touch and smell produce like breadfruit, kulim (a wild-growing nut with the scent of garlic and truffles) and keranji (velvet tamarind).

Teoh no longer hops on his bike to head to the market for these ingredients. The restaurant now has a purchasing manager who works alongside the chef de cuisine to secure a stable supply.

“So how we work is we have three, four or even five different suppliers per item because of seasonality and also availability,” he says.

The menu has reached gastronomic heights that veers from fantastical creations one moment to explosive deliciousness the next. Creative executions like local venison sliced thinly into carpaccio are delivered flawlessly and techniques like patin fish smoked in a Dillenia leaf demonstrate a clear understanding of an ingredient’s attributes.

Elsewhere, an origami frog made from a thin melinjo sheet sitting on a round stone, is adorned with caviar pearls, looking like it’s about to leap into a pond. The goreng pisang ice cream of 10 years ago is all but a memory but we were instead treated to a pale green creamy quenelle that tasted unmistakably of banana leaves.

Outside, the Petronas twin towers gleam in the night.

The restaurant has come a long way. It’s a massive upgrade from the football field that faced diners back in 2014. If a god of eating were to exist, he would surely be smiling upon the restaurant.