Cilantro

Cilantro is a French restaurant with a Japanese touch in the MiCasa All Suite Hotel on Jalan Tun Razak, Kuala Lumpur. Its chef is Takashi Kimura, and it was founded by Tan Boon Lee.

Tan opened Cilantro in October 1997, at the start of the Asian financial crisis, as a discreet room for fine French cooking with a Japanese streak. Its first chef was the Malaysian Ken Hoh, a protégé of Tetsuya Wakuda. When Hoh left to start a business of his own, Kimura, who had been personal chef to the Japanese ambassador, applied for the post, and he has led the kitchen for some two decades since.

Kimura builds classical French dishes around fine produce from Japan. The signature dish is a cold capellini whose sauce and garnish change with the season, and the bread arrives with a truffle butter. Other dishes have pressed foie gras between slices of unagi and hidden an oyster inside a cold vichyssoise. An anniversary menu flambéed Maine lobster in Rémy Martin and ended with a mousseline of Caraibe chocolate.

A refurbishment brought chrome pillars and marble floors to the dining room, and the Michelin Guide recommends the restaurant. Lunch is served only on Fridays, so most meals here are dinners. Few restaurants in the city have kept one owner and largely one chef for so long, and that continuity shows in a menu that changes with the seasons while keeping its signatures. Pairing unagi with foie gras sums up the idea behind the kitchen: two rich ingredients from two cuisines, joined on one plate.