Like many Malaysians around the country, the Covid-19 pandemic turned Felex Tan’s life upside down.
When the pandemic began, Tan was working at an events company but quickly realised he had to find an alternate source of income as work was non-existent during the lockdown periods.
The intrepid entrepreneur took his first tentative steps in the F&B industry when he started selling Musang King durians last year to capitalise on the local craze for the fruit.
“I was selling durian through Facebook and WhatsApp. I went to Pahang to pick up the durians and sold them in the Klang Valley. It was a great experience but really tough because I needed to do everything myself. I went from having an air-conditioned office job to opening 200 durians a day – my hands were so bengkak (swollen)!” he says.
Despite learning a lot, Tan knew this wasn’t a sustainable career path for him. So in November last year, after a series of discussions with a former colleague, the two decided to start Wa Sushi, an online delivery brand that operates out of a cloud kitchen.
Tan says as a newbie to the industry, he has had his work cut out for him. As his customer base is made up purely of deliveries, he has to work doubly hard to ensure the orders are handled properly – something he learnt the hard way.
“In the early days when we received orders from multiple food delivery platforms, we made some silly mistakes like overlooking orders. And once the food is delivered, there are only two options – either refund the money or cook a new meal, send it to the customer again and bear the cost. And we ended up bearing a lot of additional costs because we were making so many mistakes!” he says.
Tan says he also realised how important it is to take charge of things like the food inventory system, instead of just leaving it up to the chef.
“In the early days, I didn’t really track our purchase and usage. Our gross profit was about 20% to 25% but after a while, I realised our product usage was very high, but our sales were not.
“So I took charge and manually checked things like how many chickens were bought and how many orders this translated to. And from there, the gross profit went up to 50%, which means we had been losing 25% for no good reason, which is a huge loss to a new business like ours!
“Since then, we have managed to drastically reduce our wastage as the chefs now manage the ingredients really well, so our wastage is now 1% or even less than that and we have been able to maintain a gross profit of 50%. It was a painful learning curve, though,” he says.
The menu now includes about 40 different Japanese-themed options. Tan and his team constantly track the performance of all the different dishes across the various delivery platforms as well as on their own website. Their focus now is on using the same ingredients in different meals.
To begin your sushi adventure with the brand, try the Kofuku Sushi Set (RM69.90) which includes grilled salmon nigiri, fresh salmon nigiri, grilled unagi nigiri, cream cheese with salmon maki, kappa (cucumber) maki and shiko (pickled radish) roll. This is a sushi collection that is likely to satisfy sushi fans of every stripe.
Highlights in the platter include the salmon nigiri, which features a plump, velvety slab of fresh salmon mounted atop a carefully portioned and moulded heap of sushi rice. The grilled unagi nigiri also hits all those requisite high notes as does the cream cheese with salmon maki. All in all, you can expect a wholly satisfying sushi adventure with a focus on fresh, clean flavours.
Up next, try the Temari Set (RM79.90) which will be launching in December. Temari (which means hand ball in Japanese) is a small, ball-shaped sushi that is fairly difficult to find in most Japanese restaurants in Malaysia, because there is an art to forming these delicate corpulent mounds.
Wa Sushi has clearly mastered this art as each temari sushi is perfectly rotund. This cushiony ball offers soft plumpness, which is then accentuated with individual ingredients like salmon, prawn and octopus.
Star offerings from this collection include the prawn temari sushi, which features a soft, pliant prawn juxtaposed atop the rice and the salmon temari sushi which features a fat slab of salmon on rice. This makes for a slightly different (and very eye-catching) take on the sort of conventional sushi so ubiquitous everywhere else and is certainly well worth trying.
The brand has also cleverly introduced divergent takes on the classic sushi in the form of the bushito, which is essentially a burrito/sushi hybrid, which resembles a burrito but has most of the traditional flavours and components of an old-fashioned sushi.
The salmon bushito (RM13.99) for instance is stuffed with raw salmon, pickled radish, cucumbers and a spicy mayonnaise and is an enticing concoction that essentially feels like a hand-held, on-the-go version of a poke bowl. It is both comforting as well as filling without being too cloying.
The sumoyaki burger (RM15.99) features double trouble in the form of both deliciously crispy fried chicken which segues into succulent teriyaki chicken in what proves to be a masterclass in poultry hedonism. The only blot in this otherwise picturesque tableau is the seasoning, which is a tad salty in some parts of the burger.
For a sample of comfort food in its purest form, indulge in the chicken karaage (RM16.99 for six pieces) which features perfectly battered crunchy chicken replete with all the requisite sound effects when you bite into it. This is the sort of soul food that instantly elevates the spirits.
In the future, Tan has major plans for Wa Sushi to become one of the biggest online delivery brands in the region. In fact, his blueprint for the next few years includes franchising the brand across the Klang Valley and beyond.
“We know what we are good at. We want to position ourselves as an online restaurant, so instead of opening physical restaurants, our goal is to franchise and expand the brand the e-commerce way,” says Tan.
Order online from Wa Sushi at www.wa-sushi.com.
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