Abbinash is the founder of Supper Club Dinners, an intimate event held each month with a different theme. Each session brings together around 10 guests – most of them strangers – at a single table for a night of degustation and warm conversation.
The slots for each round are very quickly snapped up each time he announces them on Instagram.
On Aug 18, the professionally trained chef celebrated two years of Supper Club with a “Modern Malaysian” theme that also marked Merdeka Day, serving up unique culinary creations using locally sourced ingredients.
During the dinner, Abbinash shared how he had travelled across Malaysia, from Penang to Johor, for eight months to find inspiration and source ingredients for the menu.
“August is the time for me to give back to the country,” he told FMT Lifestyle. “We are so used to glorifying chefs from Europe and ingredients flown from across the world. But I have always been fascinated with what my nation has to offer.”
The dinner featured five courses, starting with two appetisers: passionfruit gulai lemak with poached scallop, and oyster with asam pedas sorbet.
You’d never know that the scallops and oysters were cultivated in Batu Pahat, Johor – their freshness could easily have rivalled those from Japan!
At one point, diners were asked to taste-test components of upcoming dishes. A red tangy sauce turned out to be strawberries reduced in clarified lamb gastric juices, later paired with a smoked duck in a burnt chilli marinade.
Another standout was a sticky-sweet component that turned out to be madu kelulut – honey from stingless bees – sourced from Orang Asli villages in Tanjung Malim.
This found its way into the night’s first dessert of vanilla ice cream – made with beans sourced from a second-generation farmer in Batu Ferringhi – paired with freshwater caviar from Tanjung Malim. The second dessert was a sumptuous deconstructed soy cheesecake.
But the highlight of the evening had to be the 14-day dry-aged mutton rendang with nasi ulam. Abbinash regaled his guests with this anecdote: “I don’t own a dry-ageing machine, so I had to improvise. I got a mini fridge, drilled holes into it, and placed two fans outside it!”
The result? Tender fall-off-the-bone meat, worth every bit of effort. “The rendang is definitely one of my top three dishes I’ve served.”
Beyond the Merdeka menu, Abbinash has created other memorable dishes during Supper Club’s two-year run. One particularly proud item was served during a dinner themed around the works of Indian film director Mani Ratnam.
“I created a dessert that was an actual QR code guests could both eat and scan, which would play a song from his movie,” Abbinash shared.
The road not taken
Despite his fine-dining flair today, Abbinash’s journey began with humble roots. His passion for cooking, ignited in the kitchen alongside his single mum, led him to culinary school at University of Wollongong Malaysia KDU College.
Soon after, he had a dream gig lined up at a Michelin-starred patisserie in Paris, but alas, financial constraints crushed those plans. “The night I rejected the offer, my friends and I drowned our sorrows in whiskey,” Abbinash recalled.
That’s when a friend suggested he start baking and selling cakes online, which paved the way towards the eventual creation of Supper Club Dinners. That whiskey bottle now sits on the table at every dinner, a symbol of the path he chose instead.
“If I had gone to Paris, I would’ve been working at one restaurant,” Abbinash concluded. “Now it’s like I run a new restaurant every month!”
Follow Abbinash and learn more about Supper Club Dinners on Instagram.