Soon after meeting Salil Mehta, it’s easy to wonder at his detailed appreciation of Malaysian cuisine and his experience as a restauranteur. Between running the only Malaysian restaurant ever to have won a Michelin star in America while keeping the plates aloft at another one recently opened the other side of town, he’s also been juggling parenting duties after his wife Stacey’s family medical emergencies at the height of the busy summer season.
He’s tired but surprisingly unruffled tonight. He’s an enthused and articulate advocate for a peranakan/nyonya-influenced cuisine in America. Thankfully for his business, it’s also a taste that has recently become more fashionable for the often jaded palates of New York.
Yet he only bought into his first restaurant, Laut, just over four years ago and his latest “baby”, the Pasar Malam diner in Brooklyn’s hipsterville Williamsburg is not even a year old. Barely 30 years old himself, Salil admits he’s had a steep learning curve in the restaurant business, plunging in at age 25 buying Laut, near busy Union Square in expensive midtown Manhattan.
It seems an unusual move to make for a Parsons design school graduate from New Delhi, who soon after graduation had scored a coveted albeit junior role at Armani’s Privé and couture departments. But as he soon discovered, the high-end design and fashion worlds and award-winning diners aren’t so different — both worlds require lots of stamina, a particular tenacity in fashioning unique pleasures for others, and relentless attention to detail. He learnt much about restaurants — and reinforced his bias for hybrid tastes and flavours — when he married Stacey at age 21, he says. Stacey’s family is a tale in itself — they still run two of New York’s (and America’s) rare Indian-Chinese restaurants, a legacy of her generations-old ethnic Chinese family from Calcutta’s historic Chinatown.
And like Armani, Salil seems to revel in giving the classics a twist before sending them on their way. It’s apparently how you get to perk up the Michelin judges, who regularly face the thousands of dining options popping up every year in the intense, perhaps over-heated bain-marie of tastes that stretch across New York’s five boroughs. For Salil, it’s been ensuring the delicate mix of flavours of assam, galangal and creaminess are right before sending dishes out to diners usually unfamiliar with Malaysian cuisine.
“I like to consistently innovate and remember the classics,” he explains, in between directing his buzzing kitchen of a dozen people. It’s not yet 7 this mild spring evening mid-week and the 20 tables are already filling up. There are the full complement of eight waiting tables tonight, with another four delivery chaps expecting a similarly busy night outside.
“By classics, I mean American and Asian classic recipes. So it’s easier for everyone to identify with what we’re doing and in that process expose them to flavours and ingredients they would not otherwise try. For example, Laut’s coconut cheesecake or coconut toddy: we make our version with fresh young coconut and nigiri sake. In Pasar Malam, we recreated the oatmeal shrimp in a shape of a donut, that is shrimp and chicken mince with curry leaves, garlic, ginger crusted with oatmeal.”
“Another would be ‘shrimp in a sarong’. Essentially, it’s shrimp in a blanket but we add cream cheese, bacon, chilli padi. We made a Chinatown waffle, which is the same sort of pancake you get in Chinatown at 15 pieces for a buck, but we infuse ours with coconut milk fresh from desiccated coconut, not tinned like usual.”
Laut’s version of the classics that had thrilled the Michelin judges — who this year have knocked off Laut’s star, spreading the love instead with the ‘affordable quality dining’ Bib Gourmand awards to Laut and four other Malaysian restaurants — include Hainanese chicken rice, assam laksa, beef rendang and roti chanai, with the ‘umami’ dishes like sambal much favoured in the past few years’ guides.
Having regularly ordered these above classics and several of Laut’s classic desserts-with-a-twist as well over the past few years, Michelin-star and not, the quality at Laut remains consistently good. And it’s reminder how perhaps that at the one-star to ‘Bib Gourmand’ levels, the Michelin guide can make arbitrary decisions in favour of consolation prizes even if nothing apparently changes.
Salil says he’s puzzled but mostly unfussed, having been preoccupied in getting Pasar Malam ready for last summer’s prime time. Moreover, Michelin guide recognition is useful in growing new customer traffic, especially for the hordes of tourists who descend on New York like ravenous beasts during the holiday seasons, guides in hand for the sweltering summer. He laments how his Thai menu of the basics like pad thai and green curry still bring in half the revenue for Laut. But he’s happy that in Brooklyn, Pasar Malam can be “85 per cent Malaysian and only 15 per cent others” because of a more “adventurous” public who have taken to dessert mash-ups like his Roti S’mores — Hershey’s chocolate graham crackers and toasted marshmallows on roti, anyone?
“The Michelin guide helps us stay alive, keeps the tourist clientele coming in. And being in high-rent Union Square, we depend on the tourist traffic volume,” he explains, adding that it’s probably why this year’s guide’s new entries to the hallowed Michelin list are mostly located off Manhattan, in Queens and Brooklyn, where the rents are cheaper.
“My rent is almost US$28,000 a month, and labour costs are rising with our two dozen people. About 35 per cent of our costs is the payroll, with food costs another 35 per cent. Ideally for a restaurant, rent should only be about four to five days of sales — so you can imagine the traffic we’d need.”
It’s not the first time Salil’s mood improves considerably as he dives into the details of how Laut and Pasar Malam tackle the ‘classics’, with the twists done by a tasty fusing of otherwise Western ingredients. He uses both his assam laksa and his pulut inti dessert as examples of how Laut aims to keep a fidelity of Malaysian tastes with the reality of New York costs:
“Traditionally, the pulut’s inti itself was gula melaka, which has a unique taste by itself and which in my experience, the Western palate hasn’t yet accepted. To remove that unfamiliarity, we slow-cooked the inti with coconut but we added (Indian) jaggery, palm sugar, rock sugar — this balances out the gula melaka flavour, even changes the texture somewhat, and sometimes reminds me of the flavour of the betel leaf. It becomes something quite different, and it suits our winter season. We have to do traditional cuisine with a twist, because what you’d consider proper Malaysian cuisine is not yet acceptable to even a New Yorker’s palate.”
“Let’s talk about assam laksa as it’s one of (celebrity chef and South-east Asian cuisine fan) Anthony Bourdain’s favorite dishes. Important ingredients to deliver flavor have to include fresh turmeric root — not frozen — which costs US$3 and change; galangal flower (torch ginger) at $3 a piece; lemongrass, which is now over $75 a 25-pound case; laksa leaf, usually very hard to source and $20 per pound; fresh sardines; and laifun noodle, hard to source.
“Consider also the fresh toppings and American portions that are usually a lot bigger than Asian portions, so for me one bowl of assam laksa can cost me about $9.” (It sells for $15 at Laut.)
A prevailing challenge across New York restaurants is securing and keeping talented staff, and Salil has learnt this tough lesson early when his two lead chefs went off to set up their own shop barely months into his new ownership of Laut. So how critical is continuity of staffing in the kitchen, and on the dining room floor, especially when dealing with crowds who are sampling Malaysian fare for the first time?
“The staff is an extension of us on the floor and in the kitchen,” he says emphatically, “so having a consistent staff is very important because it’s hard to find someone who already knows about the food we serve — it takes longer to train someone as compared to a sushi restaurant. While people are okay with expensive Indian, Japanese, Chinese restaurants, higher-end Malaysian and Singaporean is not yet acceptable. Finding kitchen staff who know the traditional recipes so we can innovate is even harder, and because there is such a diverse mix back in Malaysia, it’s hard to determine the authenticity of some things.”
“Like there’s a few dishes I was selling like ayam sio and some of my chefs had never heard of it. And Babi pongteh. But it’s the fault of the cultures because they safeguard secrets, shared only with some people, with recipes taken to their grave.”
With Anthony Bourdain promising a “Singapore-style” food hall opening next year in lower Manhattan, in one of the most expensive plots of real estate on earth, this may be the best time ever for Malaysian cuisine to break out into the American mainstream of ‘Asia’ alongside Japanese, Chinese, Indian and Thai food.
“People like Bourdain are great because they are a medium to reach the masses, who tend to listen to someone from ‘home’ rather than explore something new on their own,” Salil says, recalling how Bourdain has been to Laut a few times, even hosting a big Singapore food festival there once.
“He personally has had a lot to do with educating people and introducing them to the richness of South-east Asian cuisine and helping them understand how unique each region is and how they have influenced each other as well. Whether the market will respond or not time will tell. But I hope this food hall concept of his gives someone who cannot afford the high rents and labour of a restaurant an opportunity to showcase what they can do rather than giving spaces to juggernauts like ShakeShack.”
In Salil’s world, he needs to keep running at summer’s hectic pace until next year just to keep up with a demandingly capricious New York market. Sipping his restaurant’s signature kopi peng over tonight’s black, glistening hokkien mee, he nods himself awake at the night’s second sitting that’s about to begin.
(via a version published in Esquire Malaysia, November 2015)
