When Wong Chin Hua first opened Restaurant Shu in Kuala Lumpur over a year ago, he was determined to showcase the Chinese diaspora cuisine so peculiar and precious to people of Chinese descent scattered all over the world.

A year later, the intrepid chef finally feels like he has found his groove in terms of rediscovering his heritage in brand new ways.

Chin, as he is better known, is a Malaysian who grew up in Singapore, where his parents worked. He went on to pursue his passion for culinary arts by working in top restaurants around Singapore like Tippling Club, as well as international eateries like the one Michelin-starred Canvas in Bangkok, Thailand, as well as Ensue by Christopher Kostow in Shenzhen, China.

Ironically, the first time this Malaysian actually lived in his homeland was when the Covid-19 pandemic struck. The dissonance of belonging and yet not belonging somewhere, and the compelling narrative of his own life trajectory is what drives his cuisine. It taps into heritage, roots, migration and how cuisine can evoke both a sense of identity and conversely, be completely borderless.

“As someone who grew up as a third culture kid, and who has never really been home anywhere, identity is a very curious thing, right? I’ve never felt Singaporean, or even Malaysian because I didn’t grow up here. Identity to me was ... ‘I’m Chinese’. That was the one thing I could hold on to.

“Living in China and realising I knew nothing about my own culture ... this was my inspiration to not cook Chinese dishes but to cook instead, without identity.

“I looked at certain things which I thought really screamed ‘Chinese’. But I didn’t want to cook Chinese food. I just wanted my dishes to have that little sense of Chinese-ness,” he says.

Chin’s menu takes diners on a journey through the Chinese diaspora. — Photos: Restaurant Shu KL/Instagram

With his most recent menu, Chin says these are the sort of stories he is trying to tell through food.

“When we settled on it, I was like, ‘Huh, yeah, this is what I was trying to do’. I just didn’t have the words to express it. And because I couldn’t express it, I couldn’t cook it. But now, I hope I do,” he says.

The restaurant only serves tasting menus. The current one, called Identity, is priced at RM520++ per person and takes diners on a wondrous journey of discovery through meals that evoke a sense of familiarity while infusing ambitious new ideas and concepts into each meal.

Chin works with just one other person in the kitchen to construct and develop the menu, and yet everything is made almost entirely from scratch, which tells you volumes about both his work ethic and ambition.

Highlights from the menu include the Pomfret, Salted Plum, which is a play on Teochew-style steamed fish. Here, the fish is aged to increase its glutamic acid and give it a richer sense of umami.

A riff on Teochew steamed fish, the aged pomfret is packed with flavour.

Accoutrements like salted plum, ginger and mushrooms adorn the fish while a sauce fashioned out of fish bones is poured over it.

Overall, the dish has those tangy, acerbic notes so reminiscent of Teochew-style steamed fish but also a sharper, almost smokier countenance from the ageing. It’s a refreshing take on a classic that still pays respect to traditional ingredients and components.

A course simply named Rice is actually not really rice, but bread fashioned out of it!

“The bread is something personal to me, because it is something I have been working on for eight years,” says Chin.

The bread course showcases the east Asian affection for rice by using rice as a leavening agent.

Here, jasmine rice is used as a leavening agent to make the bread, which is paired with gan lan cai butter accentuated with a pork fat emulsion. Gan lan cai is a traditional preserved vegetable dish typically made by curing olives and mustard greens in oil, salt and soy sauce.

In this iteration, the bread is very memorable – a hardy crust gives way to a tender, airy chew while the butter is an unctuous, slightly vegetal offering with an animalistic richness running through its veins.

A crowd favourite is the simply-named Yellow Wine, which highlights the beauty of Shaoxing wine, in this case, a drinking quality one transformed into a buttery liquid, which courses through the arteries and veins of the seafood that swims alongside it.

This dish is a seductive mistress whose bewitching qualities will endear itself to you the minute your spoon lands on the homemade Shaoxing wine butter, which screams “Oriental opulence” from the very first mouthful.

The hands-down winner of the menu is the Shaoxing wine course, which will leave you feeling drunk with joy.

If you’re lucky, you might just get something off-the-the menu like the roast duck instead of the Hao You Beef or Ginger Scallion Lobster offered as part of the RM120++ supplement option.

The duck is a burnished beauty with a waxy, golden-brown skin that segues to juicy, succulent meat within. It’s a dish that highlights the natural attributes of this avian sensation without too many additional elements getting in the way.

End your meal on a sweet note with the Dumplings, Smoked Coconut, Coconut Cashew Ice Cream. The rice dumplings here are meant to represent QQ, which is a term used in Taiwanese to describe food like fish balls or tapioca pearls (boba) that represent springiness and chewiness.

This is complemented by a smoked coconut sauce and coconut cashew ice cream.

As a whole, the dish has tropical nuances that pay homage to the strong coconut overtures enjoyed by many South-East Asians. The Chinese element here is in the rice dumpling, which is chewy and bouncy to the touch. It’s a very pleasant denouement to the meal that will remind many Malaysian diners of home and hearth.

Ultimately, Chin says he has done a lot of growing up since opening Shu and the food he serves now is telling of his odyssey of self-reflection and realisation.

“This is a direction that I feel very comfortable with,” he concludes.