Reinventing the stall
THE FOOD CLUB
| Shangri La's legendary hotel in Penang, Rasa Sayang, is slated to open its doors at the end of this month after a two-year-long renovation. One of the restaurants in this traditional-handicrafts-meets-contemporary-chic property is the Spice Market Café, arguably the group's signature. Food stalls offer predominantly cuisines of South-east Asia: Japanese, Malaysian-Indian, Malayan and Chinese. |
| Brainstorming is currently on regarding the marketing of the café. The management is quite clear that it does not want to position itself as a five-star hawker centre, though that is, in essence, what it is setting out to do. |
| The unique part of the exercise is the spices that one can buy in the entrance lobby of the café. Advertising is likely to centre around the spice story: a Malaysian of Indian origin is the supplier of the spices and his family history is about to be catapulted into fame. |
| The properties of star anise versus cinnamon, and the advantages of powdered haldi over the whole dried root is set to be explored in a series of cards that will give a recipe for some of the Café's dishes. |
| This sort of thing could conceivably work well here: spices for sale at an Indian restaurant, especially for some of the unknown ones like kebab chini and patthar ke phool. It may also work for South-east Asian herbs and spices, except that we would not be promoting a home-grown cuisine. |
| On the other hand, roti canai and dhall are as quintessentially Malaysian as laksa is, except that it is a minority food. I can't imagine any of our hoteliers or restaurateurs sharing the limelight with a spice plantation owner or a trader, though it is within the bounds of probability that recipe cards and notes about spices are shared with customers. |
| Where the mind boggles is the open-hearted sharing of space with Penang's famous street-food stalls. Suleiman T A R, communications manager of the hotel, has plans to stage well-publicised competitions of all the hawkers in a particular category, say mee hoon at the Café. |
| They will be judged by members of a jury that is likely to be comprised of regular guests, food critics and the hotel's own team of chefs. The winner of that particular competition will receive a plaque to display at his hawker's stall, proclaiming him (or her) the purveyor of best nasi kandar or fish curry in Penang. |
| The possibilities of the Oberoi or Taj groups sharing a common platform with a Chowpatty bhelpuri vendor or a vada pao stall are remote indeed. |
| The obvious excuse is the lack of hygiene, but there would also be a reluctance to share common cause with a down-market dhaba. Time to get our street-side stalls to upgrade their hygiene? I think so. |