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of Atelier Binchotan spends most of his time with his back to diners, though he insists it’s not in his nature to be so withdrawn from them.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 .