Dewakan Shah Alam

Awards

MICHELIN Guide

Two stars restaurant, 2024

All Michelin stars in Shah Alam All Michelin stars in Malaysia All 2 stars Michelin in Shah Alam All 2 stars Michelin in Malaysia

OAD

Asian Restaurants 2024, 127

All OAD Asian in Shah Alam All OAD Asian in Malaysia

The World’s

50 Best

Asia`s 50 Best Restaurants 2024, #56

All Asia`s 50 Best in Shah Alam All Asia`s 50 Best in Malaysia

Restaurant Ranking

Restaurant Ranking 2024, #1307, PRO #17.25, USER #0.00

All Restaurant Ranking in Shah Alam All Restaurant Ranking in Malaysia

Chef

Darran Teoh

Cuisine

Malaysian, Contemporary

• 2023

Dinner at Dewakan

on 22 Feb 2023

by Margaret Lam

A quick trip to Kuala Lumpur allowed me to have a glimpse of the current food scene in the city. The restaurant that impressed me the most is Dewakan which you may have heard the name from Michelin or Asia’s 50 Best. But it was @kristianbaumann who has been telling me that I must visit Dewakan since before covid, I knew there must be something special about it.

Kristian was so right. This is not a modern Malaysian restaurant, a false label and categorisation much like calling Ikoyi... More

A quick trip to Kuala Lumpur allowed me to have a glimpse of the current food scene in the city. The restaurant that impressed me the most is Dewakan which you may have heard the name from Michelin or Asia’s 50 Best. But it was @kristianbaumann who has been telling me that I must visit Dewakan since before covid, I knew there must be something special about it.

Kristian was so right. This is not a modern Malaysian restaurant, a false label and categorisation much like calling Ikoyi as modern African cuisine.

While the extensive use of local or indigenous ingredients and spices coming from mountains, sea or jungles contributed to the backbone of Dewakan, Chef Darren has created his own original cuisine that gives you a completely different horizon with these elements. What I experienced in the meal was bold and fearless transformations of the fundamentals (some of which may not even be familiar to locals) into something truly unique to Dewakan.

Chef Darren is a pioneer in bringing Malaysian cuisine into modern gastronomy, the road must not be easy when he opened his restaurant 8 years ago. But he possesses incredible knowledge of not just the common but also rare and unusual ingredients gained from his childhood, coupled with sound cooking techniques, bringing you to the new world of Malaysian ingredients. His role in cultivating the next generation of chefs in Malaysian food scene is reflected in his young team which shows enormous enthusiasm, genuine hospitality and dedication (I could feel it when they presented the dishes to me). Darren is a true chef.

I won’t go through all the dishes, you can go over the pictures. It puzzled me while I was eating at Dewakan, why is it not more well-known because my meal here was better than many I had in London. It is so original.

If you cannot find food with these flavors in Malaysia or even in the world except in Dewakan, wouldn’t that already make it a destination restaurant because there is only one in the world? Less