{"id":186200,"date":"2026-04-05T10:29:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-05T10:29:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/186200\/"},"modified":"2026-04-05T10:29:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-05T10:29:08","slug":"restaurant-review-kelang-the-new-yorker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/186200\/","title":{"rendered":"Restaurant Review: Kelang | The New Yorker"},"content":{"rendered":"

The best thing on the menu at Kelang, a Malaysian restaurant in Greenpoint that opened in December, is a puffy paratha on a bed of spiced red-lentil dal, topped with creamy Italian stracciatella cheese. Depending on who you are, where you\u2019re from, and how rigid you are in your notions of gastronomic interpolation, this will strike you as either an absurd concept or a brilliant one. Kelang is part of a new crop of restaurants that celebrate the cultural synthesis of many immigrant groups that coexist in tight proximity to one another, from the Southeast Asian-kissed Italian American joint JR & Son<\/a> to the Southern-meets-Sichuan fried-chicken spot Pecking House. What these places are doing isn\u2019t \u201cfusion\u201d in the cynical sense, wherein a chef from one culture raids another for decorative elements. It\u2019s something more personal, less calculated. Kelang\u2019s paratha isn\u2019t a pizza, but it\u2019s not not a pizza; it\u2019s chewy, wheaty, savory, creamy, and fresh, with a bit of heat in the dal and a brightening zing of green from a tangle of herbs on top.<\/p>\n

This intermingling isn\u2019t exactly a new phenomenon (birria ramen! Pastrami burritos! Gumbo!), but Kelang\u2019s approach feels specific to this moment. Call it the second-generation turn: the cooking of children whose palates belong not to their parents\u2019 homelands but to the cities that they were raised in; cooks making food that doesn\u2019t attempt to re-create someplace distant, in space or in memory, so much as to reflect their actual lives, which are hybrid and hyphenated, deeply rooted yet widely branching. Kelang\u2019s owner, Christopher Low, is an American-born son of Malaysian parents. He grew up in Brooklyn, eating his parents\u2019 cooking in addition to the Haitian and Jamaican food of his neighbors and friends. In 2022, he, his parents, and his sister opened a restaurant, Hainan Chicken House, in Sunset Park, a counter-service spot named in celebration of a regional culinary export that\u2019s hugely popular in Malaysia: poached chicken, fragrant with scallions and ginger, served with chicken-infused rice and sauces. The restaurant became a minor sensation\u2014the titular dish is terrific, silken and subtle and rich, but what most stood out was a rotating lineup of specials, mostly hawker-style Malaysian fare, particularly the food of Klang, his parents\u2019 home town, on Malaysia\u2019s western coast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The best thing on the menu at Kelang, a Malaysian restaurant in Greenpoint that opened in December, is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":186201,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,99,2422,11938,9,24,63],"class_list":{"0":"post-186200","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brooklyn","8":"tag-brooklyn","9":"tag-brooklyn-headlines","10":"tag-brooklyn-news","11":"tag-greenpoint","12":"tag-malaysia","13":"tag-new-york","14":"tag-new-york-city","15":"tag-nyc"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186200\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}