The Hit & Mrs Duo

The Star's Life Inspired ran my article on Hit & Mrs on Sunday. It is such a pleasure to be working with a great editor! The Star's Senior Editor Julie Wong knows her food, and she knows the people behind the food, and she knows writers. That's a great three-fer, and not as usual as it may sound, because, this is Malaysia where vegetarian journalists get sent to food tastings at steakhouses. I kid you not. My old workmate was that vegetarian!

When I sent in my first draft of the piece, Julie told me she got the impression I wasn't too hot for the food. She was spot-on. I fight an on-going battle with liking chefs, but not liking their food. Thankfully, I have not yet met a chef whose food I absolutely loathed, or did not get, but there have been, errrr.. hits and misses.

I like chefs as people. Like doctors and vets, they do a job I couldn't possibly do, despite how much I yearn to. I'm under no illusion about the life of chefs. Very few make it Jamie Oliver or Gordon Ramsay's level. The fortunate ones open their own restaurants. The rest will slave in hot kitchens for the better part of their lives, and be completely unable to socialize out of the kitchen hierarchy when they leave the business. It's a world that sucks you in and spits you out. That's why I regard the men in white as everyday heroes, and do all I can to promote them and give them an outlet for frustration if they need it.

I'm also a big supporter of our local Malaysian culinary talent. These guys swim against the tide, what with Malaysia being not as well-supplied food-wise as our neighbours down South, and the prevalent halal issues faced by commercial F&B operations.

I always feel a bit bittersweet each time I meet chefs who have made it in countries other than Malaysia. Doing so means they have held their own and are at a certain level of ability and expertise; but it also means my country has lost another possible culinary star.

Love the set-up and feel of Hit & Mrs.

The two chefs who are in charge of the kitchen at the very cool, industrial-chic restaurant, Hit & Mrs in Bangsar are, at a small level, people like that. Both are Malaysians. Both left the country to work in Singapore, citing the need to raise the bar in terms of the profile of chefs they could work under. They returned to Malaysia, to Hit & Mrs, looking for a challenge. And by golly, did they get it.

Chefs Keith and Edmund (left to right) in their galley at Hit & Mrs.

Head Chef Keith Choong Khee Fatt has worked in Singapore for about ten years. He was looking at new restaurants in Kuala Lumpur when he found Hit & Mrs. He was so taken by the look of the place, he applied for the job. When he got it, he brought along his wingman, Sous Chef Edmund Chong Ern Chuan. Together, they are the one-two tag team of Hit & Mrs. They changed the menu, with the brief being 'modern, urban cuisine'.

In Singapore chefs plan menus knowing suppliers can bring them what they need. From beef cheeks to sumac and kamut, there's bound to be a supplier. It's not quite like that in Malaysia. For one, the Ringgit is much lower than the Singapore Dollar, making importing very expensive. Secondly, to err on the side of caution, better food merchants would rather have demand exceed supply than the other way round. Thirdly, there's the halal certification. I remember a high-ranking New Zealand trade executive who told me once that Malaysia rejected meat that the Emirates had passed because the 'halal standards were not stringent enough'. Guess there are quite a few ways to bleed a cow, then!

Keith smiling in the face of challenges.

Keith found this out the hard way. But I think even he was surprised that nothing seemed to have changed from the time he left these shores a decade ago. "There are some things I can't get, and others whose quality is too poor to serve the way I want to," he told me. He also waved a hand at his chiller, saying, "That's all the storage space I have!" So thank goodness he has Ben's Independent Grocer to fall back on, as Hit & Mrs belong to the BIG Group.

Maybe that is why despite the care of preparation the chefs put into their meal presentation, I found everything lacking that X Factor. Made no mistake, everything they served up was the best they had. But it wasn't the best someone who has eaten extensively outside of Malaysia has had. And that is the other dilemma of a food writer. Do we measure against the happy medium of general dining offerings? How high do we set our standards? If a friend has served a dish a chef presents, and the item which came out of a home kitchen trumps the restaurant version, is it fair to slag off the commercial one?

To me, it comes down to whether the experience is commensurate with the cost of the meal. A Cornetto atop CN Tower's viewing deck may probably be the most memorable ice cream one may eat, and yet a meal at El Bulli may be eclipsed by getting one's passport stolen!

So, in a nutshell, if you're asking if the food is any good at Hit & Mrs, I'd say it was passable. I called Keith out on his seeming fetish for puffed rice, as it appeared in both my scallop and my beef. He sheepishly said he had been experimenting, and had it handy. To me, this was like me serving my dinner guests mushroom soup, and then offering up grilled chicken with mushroom sauce.

The quality of ingredients was not to be faulted. The foie gras, sea bream, lamb loin were top-of-the-line, but the spuma thing was just so yesterday. I think my biggest letdown was the dessert, which was Edmund's domain.

Osmanthus flower jelly.

It looked nice, but it lacked personality. It was overly subtle, to the point of being dead from boredom, despite the promising explanation of osmanthus flower jelly. RM25 is not a lot to pay for dessert, but you want something memorable - a taste or mouth feel that follows you out of the restaurant, like the hint of a lover's aftershave on your skin.

Hit & Mrs

15 & 15A Lorong Kurau

Taman Weng Lock, Bangsar, 59000 Kuala Lumpur