The ayam rempah with blue butterfly pea rice was one of the earliest dishes on the brand’s menu and has remained a favourite ever since. — Photos: EAT KITCHEN
At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, affable married couple Chuah Seet Sheng and Liew Huey Ying were running a fashion retail outlet in a shopping mall. When the lockdown was first imposed and mall traffic dropped to zero, Chuah and Liew knew they needed to do something to sustain themselves.
“We were previously in the fashion retail line, selling women’s clothing and accessories. But during the movement control order at the start of the pandemic, nobody wanted new clothes.
“We had to keep paying rent and our staff salaries so in the end, we had to cut off the business, because it was too difficult to sustain,” explains Chuah.
Chuah and Liew then thought about starting a food business to pay their bills. The biggest problem they had? Neither of them knew how to cook!
Liew (left) and Chuah had to give up their clothing store during the pandemic, and despite being neophyte cooks, found a new calling in a home food business.
“The main issue we had was both of us didn’t know how to cook. So during the MCO, we challenged ourselves to cook different meals every day; we didn’t do any repeats,” says Chuah.
In May 2020, after cooking for nearly two months straight, the couple launched their home food business called Eat Kitchen, operating out of their home in SS2 in Petaling Jaya and selling only nasi lemak.
Eventually they expanded their menu, adding ayam goreng rempah and other dishes.
According to Liew, there was a lot of research involved in developing the menu, including consultations with their mothers for heritage recipes as well as plenty of trial-and-error to perfect each recipe.
“Oh, it was a tough time for us. We had to try something new even though we had no skills at all. I am Hakka so I tried to get more traditional recipes from my mother, while Chuah spent a lot of hours learning how to fry things like chicken.
“Let’s just say there were a lot of tears involved in the process,” says Liew, laughing heartily.
The current menu has a wide range of chicken, pork and vegetable options as well as more time-intensive heritage dishes and even rice meals designed for individual consumption.
Most of the meals are Chinese-style while a few are popular Malaysian dishes. There is also on emphasis on the value of home-cooked meals, with the couple prioritising high-quality ingredients and old-fashioned cooking techniques.
Liew’s yummy Hakka-style yam pork takes three days to make.
Meals can be customised according to customers’ preferences – for example, less salt, less oil, etc.
To begin a meal with Eat Kitchen, try the Hakka Yam Braised Pork (RM35). This is a labour of love that Liew has managed to nail after plenty of experimentation and an equal amount of failure.
It is also a very time-intensive dish, as it takes her a full three days to make each batch.
“My mum makes really good yam pork so I attempted to make it and gave it to her to try and her response was ‘This is really terrible, please don’t sell it!’
“But I just kept going – I tried different types of yam and experimented and integrated it into the meal and I even went to different restaurants to try their versions. From there, I created my own and customers seem to like it,” says Liew.
It is obvious that a lot of tender, loving care has gone into this dish which boasts meltingly tender pork juxtaposed against the smooth yam.
Both have received an equal distribution of Liew’s affections and the end result harks back to old-fashioned renditions of this dish, which invoke the sort of back-breaking labour that Liew has invested into perfecting this meal.
Up next, try the Buttermilk Chicken (RM20). This is something Chuah has put a lot of effort into perfecting.
“In the beginning, the chicken wasn’t crispy, so I had to keep trying and looking for tips online. I spent hours researching videos and recipes on YouTube and experimenting with my own flour mixes,” says Chuah.
Chuah did a lot of trial-and-error before perfecting his buttermilk fried chicken.
As a consequence, the fried chicken is really good – crispy and crackly to the touch with juicy, tender meat inside. The buttermilk sauce is also potently good (although perhaps a tad thinner than you might be expecting) with sweet-spicy accents that are soothing and complement the chicken well.
From the vegetarian dishes on offer, definitely try Eat Kitchen’s Loh Hon Zai (RM30 for a regular portion). Also called Buddha’s Delight, this is a vegetarian dish that is often a staple during Chinese New Year. In Eat Kitchen’s iteration, there are at least 10 to 12 ingredients, including baby corn, wood ear fungus, carrots, mushrooms, ginkgo and red dates.
There is a home-spun quality to this meal that is reminiscent of the halcyon days of home-cooking. It may not be as fancy as modern iterations of this dish, but it has soul and character and is very flavourful.
For a taste of something with a little hint of fire, try the Ayam Goreng Berempah (RM18.90) meal set. Made up of blue pea rice, steamed okra, an egg and a large chicken thigh, this is a meal that avian fans of every stripe will enjoy. The chicken has a spice-riddled outer skin that segues into juicy, succulent meat inside. The okra is incredibly pliant and devoid of that slimy characteristic that many people find so off-putting.
The sambal on the side adds heat to the meal and takes the entire concoction to a whole new level.
The loh hon zai is a flavour-packed vegetarian dish that is an ode to a classic Chinese dish.
Moving forward, the ever-enterprising Chuah and Liew are looking at expanding as they have gained more customers and their delivery orders have swelled. But they say they also want their growth to be organic, so they will be taking things one step at a time.
“We are still evolving and learning and creating more opportunities for ourselves. A central kitchen is one of our ideas that we may want to look into, because we may want to cover more areas in the Klang Valley.
But that is a tentative plan and we have a long journey ahead, so we are taking things one day at a time and hopefully it can lead us to where we want to go,” says Liew.
Order from Eat Kitchen by sending a WhatsApp message to 015-9610 5113.
