Reinventing the stall

THE FOOD CLUB

Opening a new restaurant is never easy, and marketing one is even more challenging. Could Penang's Spice Market Café have found the answer? More importantly, are there any lessons at all that are applicable to our own situation?

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.