As at 22 Oct 2017, Chocha Foodstore is a mixed bag of a cafe. Some dishes were good the last time we tried them (especially the cincalok fried chicken and the cold brewed tea) but others lacked seasoning and spark…and the eye-watering prices added insult to the injury. There’s a neat little bar on top though (Botak Liquor Bar in its current iteration) and it’s one of the prettiest cafes in KL.

Chocha is a new resto-cafe-bar a couple of doors down from PS 150 and Merchant’s Lane that has quickly become one of my favourite places in KL (interior-wise). Here’s why.

I’m not a huge fan of tea. I get my caffeine fix from coffee. But a good tea brew still excites me in ways coffee just can’t – teas tend to span a much more diverse (and less subtle!) range of flavours. At Chocha, they serve everything from lapsang souchong (deliciously smoky with a deep, mellow body) to dong ding jin xuan (a fresh, fruity oolong) to a cold brew version of dong ding oolong. And they’re all fantastic. The tea is reason enough to visit this beautiful eatery that sits in a restored, reclaimed former brothel. There are herbs and plants everywhere, high ceilings, bare brick walls, the whole works. It’s a gorgeous, contemplative place well matched by the equally slow pace of tea-drinking. Relative to coffee, that is.

The food itself is a bit of a toss-up at the moment. While they’re tweaking the menu and getting the kitchen in gear (for August, they’ll be closing at 6pm instead of 9pm), some of the dishes don’t quite hit the mark. Case in point, the “Chinese pesto flat noodle” below:

It sounds delicious on the menu. Housemade noodle, ulam pesto (with ulam partially picked from the garden), charred capsicum, semi-dried tomato, peanut, sesame seed. Shades of Sitka, eh?

Taste-wise though, it doesn’t quite hit the mark. It’s hard to make out the pesto at all, the capsicums are soggy and wilted instead of crisp and charred, and the peanuts and sesame seed compound a very, very dry dish. Without the tea and water at the table, it would’ve been pretty hard to get this entire plate down.

The base of the dish, the housemade noodles themselves, are good. They’re promising. And Chocha‘s kitchen clearly knows that, since they’ve spun it out into 3 of the 5 main dishes on the menu. It’s pan mee with a satisfying bite, a rough tumbled sheen to an already rough hawker food that has polished itself down through the years to the point where the typical hawker store dishes out factory-rolled noodles while the new Chocha labours away in the methods of old. But that’s part of the shtick, isn’t it? This is locavorism and Pollan homecooking and the narrative of conscious consumerism, hand-pulled and instafiltered through 20-something influencers to 20-something upper middle class Malaysians.

Side-rant aside, it’s a pity that Chocha have yet to do something more interesting with what they have. The ulam pesto tasted pretty great too…the little of it that I managed to taste at all. It’s ultimately a plate that left me wishing they spent a bit more time on fine-tuning it, especially given the price (RM20).

The aglio olio with roast duck breast fared slightly better, with a rather tasty spiced duck confit pared with garlic confit, thai basil and lemongrass. Unfortunately, the last 3 ingredients were again almost entirely missing from the taste profile. Although it did remind me to oven-roast some garlic for my pasta next time.

Oh, and the duck was alright. But do you know Ah Bong’s Italian in Singapore? Yeah, yeah, I’ll write about it next time – all you need to know for now is they serve stunning food for cheap and their duck confit is sublime.

Back to Chocha though, it’s not all doom and gloom. Their Cincalok fried chicken with summer salsa is as advertised. The salsa is alright. The house tomato chutney is incredible. And the chicken itself is even better.

Druggists Beer Bar in Singapore serves a delectable Har Cheong Gai (prawn paste chicken) to go with their top-tier beer. Chocha‘s Cincalok fried chicken comes across as Malaysia’s formidable equivalent. It’s a dish of pure, concentrated bliss. The chicken is juicy, succulent and has the subtle salty briny taste of cincalok deeply infused, the skin is satisfyingly crunchy and crispy without being overly battered, and that homemade tomato chutney brings it to another level. We can only hope that the upcoming bar dishes out some top notch craft beers to go with this beauty (though we hear it may be a wine bar).

In short, go for the fried chicken and the tea. They’re some of the best in town. And hey, maybe the rest of the dishes will get better as they tweak the recipes. We’re certainly going to keep trying until they do. Also, who’s we? I’m alone as fuck ayyy lmaooo

KL isn’t exactly the prettiest of cities nowadays. Chocha and their ilk are doing their best to slowly change that. Give them a helping hand.

Chocha Foodstore

The post Chocha @ Chinatown – Bar, food, tea, (former) brothel appeared first on Foodgazer.

We ruminate on the state of gentrification in KL while appreciating the Chinatown bar PS 150 in the middle of 2016, a good half year after our first visit. As of 22 October 2017, quite a number of things have changed: in particular, we’ve heard talk of the oftentimes brusque and arrogant service. You may want to bear that in mind while also weighing it against the fact that PS 150 still serves up some of the better cocktails in town for the price point.

Before its official launch in mid-January 2016, PS 150 was a poorly-kept secret hidden away in the same building as Merchant’s Lane. Slightly outside of Chinatown-proper (ie. the garish crossroads packed with consumeristic spoofs and once-good food), there wasn’t even a front entrance in place. Thirsty patrons entered through a door in the back alley. Reservations were made through a mobile phone.

Six months on (give or take), PS150 has quite firmly established itself as one of the leading purveyors of cocktails in Malaysia. To understand why, let’s go for a brief detour:

Malaysia has no real cultural cachet of its own. Or more precisely, the urban middle class of KL has none. We largely trail in the slipstream of other soft powers and bounce from trend to trend as they expand, pivot or burn out. As a consequence, KL is currently in the midst of a curious wave of faux-speakeasies and earnest “conscious” consumerism. Aesthetics must now be backed by narratives – but more on this later. While I stop short of completely condemning the hypocrisy, as Zizek does, it’s interesting to note how pervasive this mindset is amongst the privileged.

Back to alcohol though, the crux of the current zeitgeist is the blurry line between experimentation and tradition. While some opt for a specific camp, it’s become increasingly common to find new bars comfortable with operating in both zones. So where does that leave PS 150?

First of all, it’s gorgeous. It’s part of a refurbished former-brothel, there are now three visually distinct areas to the bar, and everything looks both vintage-nostalgic and authentic. The chairs are heavy, substantial, luxuriously comfortable. The walls are exposed brick. The new entrance mimics a toy shop display and leads into a quiet alley of seats. The lighting, and lack thereof, speak of a Chinatown somehow more authentic than the ugly, real, 2016 Chinatown just outside. Everything is a haze of desaturated beauty. When I’m there, I’m typically the ugliest thing in the bar.

The drinks themselves are delectable for the most part, with a standout or two amongst the rotating menus. The Nikka from the Barrel shines without help but of course that’s a given. It’s one of the fruitiest whiskies out there, with a smoky vanilla-toffee aftertaste and a smooth top note. It’s good, but how can you judge a bar by it? The proof is not in the raw, unadorned high-proof spirits, but in the cocktails – more specifically, in the finesse of execution, in the way the disparate elements complement and contrast, in the flourish of the preparation (remember, the narrative of the experience is as important as the product), and in the layers of flavours that hit the palate and build in the mind.

By most subjective measures, it’s hard to say that PS 150 is anything but a success. The profiles are nuanced, the drinks are interesting without being overtly experimental (like, say, Bitters and Love from Singapore), and perhaps most importantly, they lack the distinct cloying sweetness that plagues most of KL’s old bar scene. In this instance, it’s handy to borrow terminology from the coffee world: PS 150 plants itself quite firmly in the new second wave renaissance of bars.

Most of the concoctions hover around the RM 40 price point, which is pretty good value for what you get.

Note: Some of the drinks below may no longer be available, PS 150 refreshes their menu every couple of months.

The lychee no. 3 is as tasty as it looks. It’s a great pick for those who prefer their drinks to be slightly sweet, and just a generally good pick for anyone looking for an interesting drink.

The Dragon Eye Fist is good. The Assamboi Margarita is even better. The Pandan Flip features pandan-spiced rum, the Southside in the East relies instead on the pairing of lemongrass and lime.

Now for the interesting part. Let’s place PS150 in its larger context. What does the proliferation of replica-speakeasies say about KL? And before you whip out gentrification, no. That’s not the answer. Never mind the obese body of research proving its effect has been grossly overstated, gentrification is a hilariously overblown bogeyman when slapped into the Malaysian landscape. This is Kuala Lumpur. There isn’t a mass of affluent Gen-whatever-we’re-called swarming over Melbourne-makeover neighbourhoods and snapping up property. We don’t have thousands of startup millionaires and billionaires descending into, and colonizing, Petaling Street. The majority of the upper-middle class come from families that were already in the same economic band.

I think it’s more valid to posit that the explosion of the 2nd wave is instead intricately tied to the cultural values of our time. Which, thanks to the good ol Interwebs, happens to be values that are largely shared across the middle class all over the world, values that look suspiciously like conscious consumerism. It’s not hard to see the innate appeal of the speakeasy. The bartender is an artisan dedicated to the intertwining of life and craft. The bar is their canvas and exhibition space alike, the physical location is masked from the commonfolk, the drinks are cheeky nods to childhood and tradition. The speakeasy comes from a time long past – a time that most of the current consumers have only experienced through arthouse movies, articles and the odd listicle or two. At the end of the day, what defines our modern generation more than our rabid hunger to romanticize nostalgia, even if it’s for a past we’ve never actually experienced? There are a whole lot of people born in the 90s who are going crazy over Stranger Things (myself included), a show that’s very deeply rooted in the 80s. 

Anyway, PS 150 dishes out some good (and some great) drinks in one of the prettiest bars in KL. You should try it. Most people already have.

Facebook page: PS 150

New fancy website: PS 150

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