James Won
A chef is the keeper of something older than himself.
I cook. I think alongside the people who grow what I cook with. I try to listen first.
James Won
The work now
From the kitchen
Photographs by Bonnie Yap.
The arc, 2013 to 2026
- 2013BadBoyCooks Diner opens in Ara Damansara. The first room.
- 2014Brasserie Enfin. Malaysia's first Krug Ambassade Chef in June; Chevalier de l'Ordre des Coteaux de Champagne in November.
- 2015Tatler Malaysia's Best Restaurants guide lists Brasserie Enfin.
- 2016Enfin by James Won at Menara Hap Seng: the Krug Chef's Table in April, Malaysia's first Hennessy Salon in November. Time Out Kuala Lumpur names Enfin Best New Opening; Tatler lists it among Malaysia's best restaurants. My Krug × Egg dish is published in Krug's Poached, Scrambled or Fried?
- 2017BMW Malaysia launches the new 7 Series with my dinner. The start of the BMW years. Two Stars for Enfin at the A.A. Taste Awards. My Krug × Mushroom dish, in From Forest to Fork.
- 2018H-Gourmet with Hennessy, Saigon. Tatler Asia names me among its 50 Groundbreaking Gastronomes.
- 2019Krug × Pepper in Oaxaca: my Hakka yong tau foo. Discover Rarity with Johnnie Walker Blue Label. Enfin's room wins a MIID REKA International Design Award.
- 2020Bouchon Enfin, the Lyonnaise bouchon, at Pavilion Kuala Lumpur.
- 2021I begin teaching at Taylor's Culinary Institute.
- 2022Shin'Labo opens after the Cameron Highlands walk, with Asia's only Krug Chef's Table, and its room wins MUSE Design Gold and a MIID REKA award. In September, The Macallan's James Bond 60th anniversary launch, with BMW. Mortlach and Rich Cacao launch there too.
- 2023MeatMore and Malaysia's first Mortlach Room. The BMW i7 handover dinner. At the HAPA Awards, Shin'Labo wins Best Restaurant of the Year and Best Service Excellence, and I receive the Special Recognition Culinary Achievement Award. The Tatler Dining Guide lists Shin'Labo.
- 2024Chevalier de l'Ordre du Mérite Agricole, a French state order. Gaggenau's first Malaysian Culinary Partner and Ambassador, and The Plan's inaugural ambassador.
- 2025I close the restaurants and turn to conservation. Serumpun Sarawak: unveiled in Kuala Lumpur, at Expo 2025 Osaka for the State of Sarawak, and in Mulu. Mepra's first Malaysian Ambassador.
- 2026UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy, Kuching endorses Serumpun Sarawak. The Kuching Finale, and Sarawak Cultural Village becomes Serumpun's permanent home. Durian: An Embodiment of Power, with the Embassy of France. Appointed Adjunct Professor at Taylor's Culinary Institute.
My training began in France. Before that I studied science, and that habit of mind came back much later in how seriously I take Sarawak’s indigenous medicinal flora. Cooking was my second formal training.
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I trained in classical technique in Paris and Lyon, and those two cities shaped everything after. Paris taught me fine dining. Lyon taught me the bouchon, the family-recipe bistro of the Croix-Rousse, which I brought twenty years later to Bouchon Enfin at Pavilion Kuala Lumpur.
The classical training was a starting point. The work I am known for, over twelve years of fine dining in Kuala Lumpur, is contemporary and modernist, and the classical grounding is what made it possible. Fluency in French classical cooking is why the Krug Champagne work, the Hennessy Cognac work and the Coteaux de Champagne honour came to me at all. The mastery came after.
The people who passed that discipline on to me, chefs and gurus and above all my beloved grandmother, are honoured on the Mentors page. Thanking them is part of the discipline too.
Opening night at Brasserie Enfin, 2014. Photograph: Brasserie Enfin archive.
Over fourteen years I opened and ran six restaurants in Malaysia, each of a different kind.
Each of the six rooms is told in full in Restaurant Legacy, from BadBoyCooks Diner to MeatMore.
Cameron Highlands, January 2022. Photograph by Choo Cheng Fei.
Before Shin’Labo served its first guest, I took the opening team up to Cameron Highlands. In January 2022 the cooks, the floor team and the sommelier walked the farms there, Uncle Leong’s biodynamic farm among them, and saw how the produce we would cook was grown. Nobody took a place in the room at Lalaport until they had stood in that ground.
The Shin'Labo opening team in Cameron Highlands, January 2022. Photograph by Choo Cheng Fei.
I wanted the team to know a lettuce before they plated one: the soil it came from, the hands that grew it and the weather it had come through. Cameron Highlands produce had been on my menus for years; the Cameron strawberry vacherin was an Enfin dessert in 2019. What the walk gave us was a habit: asking where everything on the plate came from.
What the highlands grow. Photographs by Choo Cheng Fei.
The opening team in Cameron Highlands, January 2022. Photographs by Choo Cheng Fei.
I carried that question into Sarawak. It is the same one Serumpun Sarawak now asks of Borneo’s thirty-four communities.
“Chef Won is what, in Japan, would be honoured as a ‘Living Treasure’.”
Professor Gerard Bodeker, 12 September 2024
The Kuching Finale, Sarawak Cultural Village, April 2026. Photograph by Atlas Collective.
In 2025, at their height, I closed the restaurants and moved my work to conservation and cultural diplomacy. Serumpun Sarawak was unveiled in Kuala Lumpur in July 2025. Its founding year had four parts: the unveiling in Kuala Lumpur, Osaka in August, Mulu in October, and the Finale in Kuching in April 2026.
The launch of Serumpun Sarawak, Kuala Lumpur, 10 July 2025. Photograph by Bonnie Yap.
I have not stopped cooking. The cooking now points at the indigenous gastronomy of Sarawak’s thirty-four communities and at conserving edible medicinal flora and seeds. It also feeds the curriculum work I do at Taylor’s Culinary Institute and the In Motion mentee programme that runs through every part of Serumpun. The French Borneo cuisine platform I am developing now draws its substance from this study.
Serumpun Sarawak tells each chapter of the founding year in full.
Work with James Won
Two French knighthoods, one of them a state order, have shaped the work most clearly.
Chevalier de l’Ordre des Coteaux de Champagne, November 2014; Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite Agricole, 2024. The full account, with the ambassadorships and the UNESCO endorsement, is on Recognition.
Discover Rarity, at Enfin. Photograph by Bonnie Yap.
Long partnerships with European houses, each as Ambassade chef or as first Malaysian ambassador.
Each house, and what we made together, is told in full in Collaborations.
At Enfin and around Kuala Lumpur: BMW with James Won (2022).
For more than a decade my work has been written about in Malaysia, across the region and further afield: Tatler Asia, Robb Report Malaysia, Luxuo, Prestige Online, Epicure, FirstClasse, The Star, Free Malaysia Today, Sin Chew Daily, Oriental Daily, Bernama, The Borneo Post, Sarawak Tribune, DayakDaily, Daily Express, India Outbound and Palate Asia. Together they make up the press archive.
Every piece is in the press archive, filterable by subject, brand, year and language.
On the record
“An invaluable learning experience.”
“Engaging, interactive, and intelligent.”
The work is young. If you are building something that should outlast you, write to me.