Restaurant Review: Kelang

The champion happening connected the paper astatine Kelang, a Malaysian edifice successful Greenpoint that opened successful December, is simply a puffy paratha connected a furniture of spiced red-lentil dal, topped with creamy Italian stracciatella cheese. Depending connected who you are, wherever you’re from, and however rigid you are successful your notions of gastronomic interpolation, this volition onslaught you arsenic either an absurd conception oregon a superb one. Kelang is portion of a caller harvest of restaurants that observe the taste synthesis of galore migrant groups that coexist successful choky proximity to 1 another, from the Southeast Asian-kissed Italian American associated JR & Son to the Southern-meets-Sichuan fried-chicken spot Pecking House. What these places are doing isn’t “fusion” successful the cynical sense, wherein a cook from 1 civilization raids different for decorative elements. It’s thing much personal, little calculated. Kelang’s paratha isn’t a pizza, but it’s not not a pizza; it’s chewy, wheaty, savory, creamy, and fresh, with a spot of vigor successful the dal and a brightening zing of greenish from a tangle of herbs connected top.

This intermingling isn’t precisely a caller improvement (birria ramen! Pastrami burritos! Gumbo!), but Kelang’s attack feels circumstantial to this moment. Call it the second-generation turn: the cooking of children whose palates beryllium not to their parents’ homelands but to the cities that they were raised in; cooks making nutrient that doesn’t effort to re-create someplace distant, successful abstraction oregon successful memory, truthful overmuch arsenic to bespeak their existent lives, which are hybrid and hyphenated, profoundly rooted yet wide branching. Kelang’s owner, Christopher Low, is an American-born lad of Malaysian parents. He grew up successful Brooklyn, eating his parents’ cooking successful summation to the Haitian and Jamaican nutrient of his neighbors and friends. In 2022, he, his parents, and his sister opened a restaurant, Hainan Chicken House, successful Sunset Park, a counter-service spot named successful solemnisation of a determination culinary export that’s hugely fashionable successful Malaysia: poached chicken, fragrant with scallions and ginger, served with chicken-infused atom and sauces. The edifice became a insignificant sensation—the titular crockery is terrific, silken and subtle and rich, but what astir stood retired was a rotating lineup of specials, mostly hawker-style Malaysian fare, peculiarly the nutrient of Klang, his parents’ location town, connected Malaysia’s occidental coast.