Zoe's take on a duck rice dish that he had in Kyoto, features incredibly succulent duck breasts. — Photos: ART CHEN/The Star
Zoe Rai is hunched over a large mixing bowl of julienned carrots and cucumbers. Around him are an assortment of sauces and dressings, which he deftly pours over the concoction before using his gloved hands to mix everything together.
“There you go – I’ve taken you all the way to Vietnam with that dish,” he says, flourishing his famous sweet smile.
Zoe is the quintessential underdog – a man who spent decades working in Bank Negara before pivoting dramatically to become a chef.
He then worked with legendary culinary figures like David Thompson of Nahm in London before eventually opening his namesake restaurant Zoe in Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur in 2019.
His eatery took a hit when Covid-19 hit and Zoe ended up shuttering it and going back to a banking job. But the lure of being a chef proved too hard to resist. This time around though, he wanted to do something entirely different.
“I started doing pop-ups because I still couldn’t open a full-scale restaurant – the cost was too much.
“And then I was travelling a bit – I went to France and I was seeing all these really cool, cute, small spaces that they have in Paris that are run by one or two people at the most.
“I went to a one Michelin-starred restaurant there and it was just one guy cooking. I thought, ‘It’s completely possible to do a world-class restaurant with just one person’,” he says.
Zoe is the talented one-man show behind the charming new eight-seater eatery OhMyKaseh.
And that is how Zoe opened OhMyKaseh in KL’s Mahsa Avenue, taking up a tiny 18.5sq m space and turning it into a dinky custom-built vibrant restaurant that seats a maximum of eight diners.
The eatery is oh-so cheerful and alive – colourful lights are strung throughout the space, the brick walls are a psychedelic pink and Tintin posters are adorned throughout.
Despite its diminutive size, the restaurant is also outfitted with a full kitchen replete with a two-burner stove, oven, refrigerator, freezer and various other machines.
Right at the end of the restaurant is a large window that showcases the lush foliage beyond.
It seems impossible that so many things can be crammed into such a tiny space and yet this is most definitely a restaurant. Perhaps the tiniest one you’ve ever seen – and quite possibly the title bearer of the “smallest restaurant in Malaysia”.
In terms of the restaurant name, Zoe says it is a play on the term “omakase” which is Japanese for “up to the chef”.
“A restaurant name can pigeonhole you into a certain cuisine and I wanted to cook everything under the sun.
“Then I thought, ‘Why don’t I just call it OhMyKaseh?’,” he explains.
At only 18sq m, this is probably the smallest restaurant in Malaysia.
At his new space, Zoe works entirely alone, doing everything from the marketing to prepping (he makes nearly everything from scratch), cooking and cleaning up after.
Because he is a one-man show and cooks to order so as to discourage wastage, he operates entirely through reservations and doesn’t accept walk-ins.
He also changes his tasting menu every three weeks, with each iteration taking diners on a journey through different parts of the world.
When he first opened nearly three months ago, he started out with an Egypt-inspired menu which included highlights like a delicious Egyptian baby squid with house-made Middle Eastern dukkah, salsa and labneh, then moved on to an Italian-focused one where he crafted dishes like his house-made ravioli stuffed with ricotta and topped with homemade pesto and breadcrumbs.
Pop these pickled cherry tomatoes in your mouth and enjoy all the flavours.
His current tasting menu is built around Vietnamese and Japanese flavours and is priced at RM200 per person.
“Yes, it sounds weird but it works. But I don’t fuse Japanese and Vietnamese flavours together – they’re separate. I have a few Vietnamese dishes and a few Japanese dishes,” he says.
To begin, you’ll get izakaya-style pickled cherry tomatoes with basil. The cherry tomatoes retain an acerbic tang that – once popped into the mouth – take on a sweet, plush trajectory. It’s hugely satisfying and a great way to cleanse the palate.
The watercress soup is a smooth, nourishing operator.
The next course is a watercress and ginger soup that is served piping hot.
The watercress has a pulsing vegetal energy and this courses through the veins and arteries of the soup, imbuing it with a sort of green goddess aura.
This rusticity is sluiced through by the pungency of the ginger, which adds sharp, contrasting notes to the dish.
The raw Vietnamese vegetable salad offers a rich burst of flavours and textures.— ART CHEN/The Star
Vegetables continue to make their presence felt on the menu in the form of a Vietnamese salad filled with carrots, beetroot, cucumbers, peanuts and assorted herbs and greens like torch ginger flower and banana blossom.
This is enhanced with a zingy dressing that offers verve and dimension.
The salad is fabulously riotous and offers a wondrous vegetarian journey that delivers plenty of textural contrasts as well as a flavour-packed odyssey that is impossible not to love.
Sake takes this dish of prawns and leeks to whole new delightful levels. — Photos: ART CHEN/The Star
The meal progresses to a dish of sake prawns (RM50 top-up). This four-ingredient dish is made up of prawns, leeks, butter and sake, and despite its simplicity, it reigns supreme in the taste stakes.
The prawn and leeks are cooked in sake and this has saturated every fibre and molecule of this crustacean, imbuing it with a boozy quality that is hugely addictive.
The leeks meanwhile are pliant and tender while the sauce that coats the dish offers sweetly alcoholic notes. It’s a meal that reflects how a few choice ingredients can collude to have a big impact.
The baked fish features incredibly tender flesh and a paste that has lovely herbaceous qualities.
Vietnamese cuisine takes centre stage yet again in the baked barramundi wrapped in banana leaves and coated in a Vietnamese watercress, galangal and coconut cream paste.
The highlight of this concoction is the fish, which has been grilled beautifully and retains a blistered surface that yields to tender flesh within.
The savoury part of the meal ends with smoked duck rice – an ode to a Kyoto-style duck rice that Zoe had on one of his many travels.
Zoe's take on a duck rice dish that he had in Kyoto, features incredibly succulent duck breasts.
Here, the duck breast is pan-seared and then sliced. This is then arranged over seaweed rice, with a quail egg topping the concoction. The undisputed star of this show is the duck, which is what the word “succulent” was invented for.
Here, the juicy, malleable flesh of the duck is so luscious, you’ll wonder if it floated down your throat through sheer magic.
Dessert arrives in the form of sliced mangoes and a fantastically good black glutinous rice mochi ice cream. Zoe says the ice cream is a pain to make, but by God, his labour is oh-so worth it!
The glutinous rice mochi ice cream is chewy, stretchy and insanely addictive.
The ice cream has that stretchy, chewy, bouncy quality that makes mochi so beloved everywhere and it’s honestly so superlative that you’ll want more (I know this to be true because I asked for more).
A meal at OhMyKaseh is a memorable one, largely because Zoe has the personality to carry this small space to bold new heights. He is sweet, engaging and funny and the food he produces is a reflection of himself – heartfelt, sincere and well-travelled.
Ultimately though, Zoe says he hopes to be able to maintain his little restaurant for as long as possible, given that he is already 55 and that this has always been his dream.
“The whole reason I left the bank was to do this. So I didn’t want to give it up again because for me, this was kind of my ‘last kopek’ (last attempt) at doing something that I really like before I kick the bucket,” he says, smiling.
