In the five years since it opened its doors, Hide KL has emerged as one of the city’s most vaunted fine-dining restaurants.
The tiny little eatery is helmed by the perennially pleasant Shaun Ng, a former law degree aspirant who did a dramatic career pivot and is now the restaurant’s executive chef.
Ng honed his culinary chops at famed haute cuisine temples like Le Bernardin in New York (helmed by the legendary Eric Ripert) and Kato in Los Angeles, California, where he was part of the team that helped the restaurant earn its first Michelin star.
With Hide, Ng looks to intertwine familiar Malaysian flavours and ingredients with new and invigorating ideas, fusing the seemingly disparate into brand new favourites.
Ng’s latest tasting menu is priced at RM698++ per person. Titled “What Lies Beneath”, it is described as an ode to “concealed truths, bold traditions and unexpected textures”.
If you’ve eaten at Hide before, you’ll notice cameo appearances from former stars of his previous menus in the form of budu cream cheese, airless meringue and a vibrant nasi ulam drawn from his father’s Kelantan heritage.
The new menu continues in the vein of Ng’s seafood-centric streak and opens with Extinct Secrets, a fun, whimsical entry that features a beetroot-infused dinosaur shaped cracker (presumably the “extinct” component) filled with budu cream cheese. The cracker is suitably crispy and brittle and snaps upon contact.
This culinary armour is filled with a cream cheese that has the funk and spunk of budu (fermented anchovy sauce) embedded into its configuration.
Other highlights from the Whispered Openings portion of the menu include the Surf & Turf which features a tart encased with sea bream and A4 wagyu tartare. This supple, silken configuration is given a poignant, pungent jolt courtesy of the wasabi in the amalgamation, a sleeper hit whose powers grow with every tiny bite that you take.
Then there is the Horse Mackerel Gunkan which features line-caught mackerel from the Ehime prefecture in Japan. The fish is thought to be less stressed when it is caught this way, which ultimately results in firmer flesh.
The dish is a flat-out triumph – the rice in seaweed wrap is bursting with flavour and the fish itself has a smoky underbelly and rich aquatic notes.
But the texture of the fish is the true source of its sorcery – the flesh here is voluptuous and hefty, akin to a chubby baby’s plump, dimpled cheeks.
The next segment of the menu is the Unfolding Truths section, which serves up an array of show-stoppers like Not a Bread, a brand-new variation of Ng’s signature airless meringue “bread”.
Designed to resemble two slices of bread wedged together to form a sandwich, the bread is filled with French Comte cheese that has been aged for nine months as well as honey, Chinese red dates, croutons and truffles.
It sounds ominous just reading this line-up, doesn’t it? I mean, Chinese red dates and truffles? It seems like madness.
And yet, “mad genius” would probably be a more accurate description of this dish, which is fairy-light and cloud-like with the opulence of the truffles taking centre stage here.
It also improves upon Ng’s previous edition of the meringue, offering a more thoughtful smorgasbord of ingredients that invigorate your palate from the first mouthful.
The Melinjo Curry Noodles meanwhile features a mound of noodles smothered in a prawn curry interspersed with melinjo (a traditional fruit native to South-East Asia) and topped with a fish collar salad enhanced with starfruit, cucumber, apple and a green chilli sambal to round this off.
This dish is a smooth operator, enlivened with noodles that are slick and cold to the touch. The long noodle strands are coated in a fabulous curry that is filled with spice-riddled, concentrated flavours that are oh-so seductive in a quietly elegant way, like an off-shoulder dress that betrays just a hint of mystery without revealing too much.
One of the most triumphant offerings on the menu is indubitably the Chicken & Foie.
Built around the grilled chicken wings so popular in Malaysia, the chicken here has been deboned and stuffed with glutinous rice and foie gras and finished with a tamarind glaze.
I kid you not – this is the chicken wing of your dreams. Your wingman, chick-mate... you get the picture.
This plump, victorious wing-er has been grilled till its skin is bronzed and burnished and this succulence yields to a starch-laden rice interior enhanced with traces of foie gras – its rich, primal qualities bursting through the rice barriers. The tamarind meanwhile sluices through this hedonism with a tangy current.
This is the kind of dish that makes you reflect on small, perfect moments in life. Because this right here is just that.
It’s hard to top such a memorable act but the next sequence – Beneath the Skin – works hard to gain your attention.
Built around nasi ulam, the rice here is accentuated with pomegranates, pomelo, torch ginger bud, four winged beans and a decadent black cod fish. To top it all off – crab curry is poured into the bowl of rice, its aroma so nirvanic, it smells like it was harnessed straight from heaven.
It’s a dish where profusion doesn’t engender confusion. Instead, the collusion of ingredients here form the catalyst for greatness and a dining experience so memorable, it’s a moment that will be seared in your brain forever.
From the final savoury segment of the menu, the Aged Memory is a show-stopper. Aged Penang duck is complemented with green olives and lemon compote, pepper puree and spice oil and pickled Korean pears. Under the slices of duck is a truffle puree and a duck jus to tide it all together.
The duck is a masterpiece in itself – its skin so crisp, it crackles when a knife makes contact. The flesh is firm and supple and the jus offers intense avian flavours that seep into the pores of the meat in hugely satisfying fashion.
For dessert, there is a three-layered citrus ice-cream paired with vanilla Chantilly, milk crumble and sour plum jelly.
This ice-cold citrus beauty laces the tongue with astringency and this is offset by the crumble, which offers gobs and blobs of textural crunch that take you through a voyage that culminates in sweet, sweet euphoria.
When asked if he’s upped his game, Ng smiles his same sweet smile and shrugs. “Don’t know lah. We did try,” he says.
And yet, whatever he’s doing, it’s working. Hide’s new menu reflects a take on haute cuisine that speaks to heritage and roots and yet rocks the boat with bold new ripples of change.
It is tremendously good and yet unusually for fine-dining – somehow very accessible. Perhaps this boils down to one unquestionable truth – it is food that speaks to you because it is crafted using a universal language: flavour.
