{"id":444561,"date":"2025-12-13T13:42:56","date_gmt":"2025-12-13T13:42:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/444561\/"},"modified":"2025-12-13T13:42:56","modified_gmt":"2025-12-13T13:42:56","slug":"inside-the-new-brooklyn-restaurant-mixing-malaysian-caribbean-and-italian-flavors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/444561\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside the New Brooklyn Restaurant Mixing Malaysian, Caribbean, and Italian Flavors"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Eater Award\u2013winning<\/a> Hainan Chicken House in Sunset Park opened<\/a> in 2023 with a lesser-seen Malaysian-style Hainan chicken served with sticky rice balls<\/a>, plus rotating specials that stayed fresh even for regulars. Owner Chris Low says he hadn\u2019t planned to be \u201cmega-involved,\u201d but once he found himself there far more than expected, \u201cwe owed it to ourselves to try something that\u2019s fully fleshed out that isn\u2019t just a happy accident.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the momentum behind Kelang<\/a>, the family\u2019s follow-up restaurant that opened in Greenpoint, at 715 Manhattan Avenue, near Norman Avenue, in early December. \u201cIt\u2019s everything that I wanted to be able to do at Chicken House,\u201d he tells Eater.<\/p>\n

Through Kelang, Low is pulling from various facets of his identity: his family\u2019s lineage in Malaysia\u2019s port city of Klang, his parents\u2019 Chinese Malaysian roots, and his upbringing in Brooklyn in the 1980s and 1990s.<\/p>\n

After opening Hainan Chicken House, Low came to realize that his family\u2019s hometown had its own food culture distinct from other parts of Malaysia. He points to the liberal use of dark soy, as seen in the bak kut teh, a pork stew: their version of char kway teow is also different from the one in Penang.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>\"A<\/a>\"Red<\/a><\/p>\n

The restaurant\u2019s name is the \u201cantiquated spelling\u201d of the Malaysian city of Klang. Kelang\u2019s menu is Malaysian, yes, but with Caribbean and Italian American touches \u2014 because these were the foods that Low also grew up eating.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll those cuisines bleed into [Kelang\u2019s] menu in one way or another,\u201d he says. \u201cI love that, sometimes, it\u2019s a little bit more overtly, and sometimes, it\u2019s very subtle,\u201d he says. \u201cPeople would come in and be like, \u2018This is not right.\u2019\u201d He\u2019d respond, \u201c\u2018This is right for us. This is how I had it growing up. I don\u2019t know what to tell you.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Under the salads and vegetables section, the Caesar kerabu (Malay for salad) uses sambal, crispy anchovies, kerisik (toasted coconuts), and chicories. \u201cYou would not often see a leaf like a Castelfranco or radicchio, these bitter greens in Malaysian cuisine. But that\u2019s a little bit of where some of the Italian American influence comes through.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>\"A<\/a>\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

Another Malaysian dish, redang, the dry-curried dish, is typically made with beef. Low grew up eating curry oxtail from Jamaican and Haitian restaurants in Brooklyn. Kelang\u2019s large plates version uses oxtail, plus a mixture of two types of rice: the Haitian djon djon, a black mushroom rice, and the Malaysian nasi ulam, with chopped fresh herbs. Elsewhere, dishes make use of habaneros and scotch bonnet peppers, too. Small plates include curry puffs and paratha with dal; noodles such as the abacus seeds made with gnocchi-shaped taro, and, yes, you can find the family\u2019s Hainanese chicken here too.<\/p>\n

Low, who is a filmmaker, drew from cinema to design the space, which is steeped in nostalgia and the aesthetics of Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai\u2019s In the Mood for Love (\u201cit\u2019s almost a trope,\u201d he says). The result is an \u201camalgam of memories.\u201d<\/p>\n

The family hand-tiled the floor themselves, making it look like the topographical map of Klang. The space includes gingko designs and hand-painted mirrors over the banquette and booths. Family photos hang on the walls, \u201cwedding photos and stuff from the \u201850s and \u201860s, and some of them have a little bit of a rockabilly look,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s crazy to think this was in Malaysia and these are relatives. We just found it to be so cool and wanted to present this aesthetic that people might not be thinking of when they think of Malaysia.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ultimately, Kelang is about showing the food Low and his family know. \u201cI wanted to bring this cuisine from a smaller town in Malaysia and make it more prominent.\u201d He wants New Yorkers and beyond to explore the breadth of cuisines in the Southeast Asian country.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

For now, Kelang is open for dinner and weekend brunch. It\u2019s not serving alcohol yet, because they\u2019re still waiting on their liquor license, but when that comes, expect cocktails and natural wines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Eater Award\u2013winning Hainan Chicken House in Sunset Park opened in 2023 with a lesser-seen Malaysian-style Hainan chicken…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":444562,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,16492,11647,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-444561","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-newyork","12":"tag-newyorkcity","13":"tag-ny","14":"tag-nyc","15":"tag-nyc-restaurant-news","16":"tag-nyc-restaurant-openings","17":"tag-united-states","18":"tag-united-states-of-america","19":"tag-unitedstates","20":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","21":"tag-us","22":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115712559618062822","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=444561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444561\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/444562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=444561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=444561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=444561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}