The very best factor on the menu at Kelang, a Malaysian restaurant in Greenpoint that opened in December, is a puffy paratha on a mattress of spiced red-lentil dal, topped with creamy Italian stracciatella cheese. Relying on who you might be, the place you’re from, and the way inflexible you might be in your notions of gastronomic interpolation, it will strike you as both an absurd idea or an excellent one. Kelang is a part of a brand new crop of eating places that commemorate the cultural synthesis of many immigrant teams that coexist in tight proximity to at least one one other, from the Southeast Asian-kissed Italian American joint JR & Son to the Southern-meets-Sichuan fried-chicken spot Pecking Home. What these locations are doing isn’t “fusion” within the cynical sense, whereby a chef from one tradition raids one other for ornamental parts. It’s one thing extra private, much less calculated. Kelang’s paratha isn’t a pizza, however it’s not not a pizza; it’s chewy, wheaty, savory, creamy, and contemporary, with a bit of warmth within the dal and a brightening zing of inexperienced from a tangle of herbs on high.
This intermingling isn’t precisely a brand new phenomenon (birria ramen! Pastrami burritos! Gumbo!), however Kelang’s method feels particular to this second. Name it the second-generation flip: the cooking of youngsters whose palates belong to not their dad and mom’ homelands however to the cities that they have been raised in; cooks making meals that doesn’t try and re-create someplace distant, in area or in reminiscence, a lot as to mirror their precise lives, that are hybrid and hyphenated, deeply rooted but broadly branching. Kelang’s proprietor, Christopher Low, is an American-born son of Malaysian dad and mom. He grew up in Brooklyn, consuming his dad and mom’ cooking along with the Haitian and Jamaican meals of his neighbors and buddies. In 2022, he, his dad and mom, and his sister opened a restaurant, Hainan Hen Home, in Sundown Park, a counter-service spot named in celebration of a regional culinary export that’s massively well-liked in Malaysia: poached hen, aromatic with scallions and ginger, served with chicken-infused rice and sauces. The restaurant grew to become a minor sensation—the titular dish is terrific, silken and delicate and wealthy, however what most stood out was a rotating lineup of specials, largely hawker-style Malaysian fare, notably the meals of Klang, his dad and mom’ house city, on Malaysia’s western coast.
