KUALA LUMPUR, June 25 — A tiramisu costs RM15, and some passersby at Ong Ai Li’s old stall, Nude Bakery, in Kuchai wanted her to know exactly how outrageous that was. They didn't just say so; they brought proof. 

“They would go out of their way,” Ong says. "They would go to the pasar malam and buy a tiramisu double the size of ours to show to my face and say, ‘Nah, see? This is a RM15 tiramisu!'" 

Looking back, Ong can only laugh. Just earlier that year, she was the Group Executive Pastry Chef at Emmanuel Stroobant’s two-Michelin-starred Saint Pierre, and before that, she spent 16 years leading the pastry teams in some of Singapore’s most esteemed kitchens.

“In Singapore, people used to pay S$15 for one dessert, and they’d say thank you and hug me,” she says. “Here, I was getting scolded for RM15!” (S$15 is about RM47 for context.)

Her husband and business partner, Josh Chua, remembers the way they had to convince people to become customers.

“We had to beg people to come and eat,” he says. “We told them, ‘Take and eat one first. If it isn’t nice, no need to pay’.”

Almost four decades of combined experience in Singapore between them – Raffles, Guy Savoy, Spago, Yardbird, Saint Pierre – and here they were in a food court in Kuchai, begging strangers to taste a dessert before deciding whether to pay for it. 

Still, they kept at it, closing the stall six months later to open Nude as a proper brick-and-mortar restaurant in Bangsar.

Ong, 38, grew up in Jinjang as the fifth of five daughters, with one younger brother. In a family full of accomplished siblings, baking became the one thing that was entirely hers. 

“It was the only thing I could outshine my siblings in,” she says. “That gave me confidence.” 

She decided to become a chef at 15, against a family that had a business it wanted to hand down to her. They let her go to Singapore on the condition that they paid her tuition, but she stubbornly insisted on paying her own way. 

“We all grew up like princesses,” she says. “I think they were just waiting for us to collapse and run back home. But I did not.”

Chua is a third-generation cook. He grew up in Kuala Terengganu, but had little interest in ending up in the kitchen. 

After completing SPM, he considered becoming a hairdresser, then a racing driver, and nearly enrolled in a motorsport-focused mechanical engineering programme. 

What changed his mind was a culinary degree at Kolej Damansara Utama (KDU), which he could fund with a National Higher Education Fund Corporation (PTPTN) loan.

His first job out of KDU was on the opening team at Prego, the Italian restaurant inside the Westin Kuala Lumpur, where he spent three years working up from commis to demi chef, before moving to Singapore for a sous chef post at the Raffles Grill, the position he was holding when Ong walked in as an intern.

Ong first met Chua when she was 21, a fresh-faced intern at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, working a station that, unofficially, belonged to the then 25-year-old sous chef. 

“He kind of screamed at me," she says. "That was the first impression.”

Chua objects. “I didn't scream. I don't scream. I just say the words, and everyone gets it. I don't need to scream.”

“Felt like a scream,” Ong says.

They didn't cross paths again until the next year, when Ong joined Guy Savoy in Marina Bay Sands, alongside chefs flown in from Paris and Vegas. 

Chua was already there as part of the opening team and was stationed right behind her. “I think he recognised me,” she says. “I obviously recognised him, because he was the only person who had ever scolded me in the kitchen.”

What followed wasn't romance so much as competition. Ong would start at 8.30am and still not be able to finish her prep; Chua would walk in at two in the afternoon and somehow still be done on time. 

“Every benchmark he hit,” she says, “I also wanted to hit. I wanted to be better.” It's the dynamic that's run their partnership ever since.

Guy Savoy eventually downsized, and because Ong was the last one hired, she was the first let go — transferred to Wolfgang Puck's one-Michelin-starred steakhouse, CUT, where the precision she'd built at Guy Savoy (mangoes cut into exact squares without rulers, dough sheets checked by eye against the light) counted for nothing against 200 covers a night. 

She cried for six months, but persevered. “I'm like a cockroach,” she says. “I always figure it out and survive, eventually.”

Around this time, Chua left Marina Bay Sands altogether and stayed away for almost five years: he lectured at the Institute of Technical Education (ITE), then became the head chef at Concetto by Saveur and the executive chef at San Bistro after.

Ong’s meteoric rise within Marina Bay Sands continued. When Spago, Puck’s flagship restaurant, opened in Singapore, she was transferred there as a sous chef. 

Ten months in, she was asked to replace the departing pastry chef. She tried to talk her bosses out of it. 

“I told them I couldn't do it,” she says. “I'm happy to help [the new chef], no problem. I'll train with them and work long hours, but I'm not ready.” 

They put the decision back on her anyway, handing her a stack of candidates' résumés and telling her to choose. She told them to choose. They promoted her instead, and at 26, she was the youngest pastry chef in Marina Bay Sands. 

She also became the subject of rumours she never bothered to chase down. “I was young, Chinese, and a girl. People were really wondering who I was in bed with,” she says. 

“But I didn’t mind. I'm very shut down to the outside world. My world is my kitchen and Netflix.”

The first real chance Ong and Chua had to leave Singapore came when The Peninsula Beijing offered Ong an executive pastry chef role and extended a package to Chua as well. 

Marina Bay Sands countered, bringing Chua back as executive sous chef at Yardbird. After doing the maths, they concluded they would save more money in Singapore and stayed.

A few years after that, they married, and Ong became pregnant. The hours at Spago were impossible to keep up while pregnant, so she moved to RISE, the buffet restaurant inside Marina Bay Sands, where she worked “only” 13 or 14 hours instead of close to 20. 

“She worked up until the last three days before going into labour,” Chua says. “I brought a Swiss ball into the office for her to sit.” 

She went back to Spago about a year and a half later, then left in 2023 to become corporate pastry chef for the Saint Pierre group — the post she was holding when the conversation about leaving Singapore came up once more.

“It was me,” Chua, 42, admits. “It was about growth for the both of us.” Having worked his way up to executive chef at Yardbird, he had hit the ceiling and there was nowhere else to climb on the corporate ladder. 

He told Ong: “Let’s take a chance. Two years to try being our own bosses.” 

Costs, and a desire to be closer to family meant they decided to leave Singapore and come home. 

But after almost two decades away, they found themselves in an unfamiliar home. Ong says they spent money “like tourists” the first few weeks back, still thinking in Singapore dollars while paying in ringgit. 

Though there were no shortage of parties interested in funding their new venture, both from Singapore and back here, she was reluctant to take up the offers. 

“The moment we said we were coming back people wanted to give us money,” she says. “When we were in Kuchai, one of the investors who had approached us in Singapore came and said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you came back?’ And I told him, “‘We can’t. We need to figure out how Malaysia works first.’”

Licensing, which she could navigate quickly in Singapore, became what she calls “rocket science” in Malaysia. There were 15 separate steps, many of them delayed by public holidays. 

Even getting the signboard for the current shop was no simple task. “I would get so angry and scream at the signboard guy, then I’d have to call him back and say, ‘Sorry, I'll wait for you,’" she says. “Because if not, I won't have a signboard.” 

The discipline that got her from commis to pastry chef in a few years doesn't transfer here, where, in her words, “timelines don't need to be followed.”

Manpower is the harder problem, and they're both quick to say it isn't about numbers. “It's not the quantity, it's the quality,” Chua says. 

Ong is more blunt about why. Too many kitchens here, in her view, survive without needing to perform — restaurants propped up well enough that staff get hired and promoted just to stay put, “slap two slices of bread together,” with no incentive to push further. 

“They're killing the market,” she says. “How can passionate people come through? If you're passionate in a kitchen like that, they will tell you to stop trying to be a hero.” 

The passionate ones either burn out or leave the country altogether. She and Chua did the latter years ago and are now staking a bet on a downturn in Singapore's F&B industry, hoping it sends enough of those passionate, burnt-out people back across the causeway to fill out their kitchen.

What they want to build is more relaxed than what either of them had spent two decades doing. 

“I think we're very ‘bistro’,” Ong says. “I want to do moules frites... it would be awesome with wine, everyone is chill, happy and relaxed.” 

No tasting menu, no theatre. “I don't want pretentious. I've been there. I want it to feel warm, I want nice details, I want people to be able to spend money without it feeling like a pinch.”

The name was Chua's framing of the same idea. “That's why we're called Nude,” he says. “Stripped of pretense.”

The menu they opened with is a fraction of what they'd actually like to cook. “The menu is only about 30 per cent of what we intend to do,” Chua says. 

“We can't do the full thing because of space, storage, and manpower. So we picked the dishes that aren't too expensive, that will sell, that are popular with people, and that are easier on the staff.” 

Early favourites with customers include an oxtail ragù pasta that contrasts the unctuous, gelatinous richness of braised oxtail with the bracing sharpness of pesto; a bistro classic, steak frites made with Wagyu hanging tender; the light, airy pavlova that became a signature back in Kuchai; and a satisfying sticky date pudding that is utter heaven. 

Ong treats the menu as a "live" experiment, adjusting it against what regulars keep asking for. “We are also using this space to help strengthen the menu,” she says.

The tiramisu that opens this whole story doesn't actually sell that well at Nude. In Malaysia, it's a signature in name more than in practice.

What sells is the thing Ong didn't plan for. Making the tiramisu uses up egg yolks; the leftover whites became a pavlova. 

“It was never meant to become the highlight,” she says, “but now it is, and now I have too many egg yolks.” 

She's working on recipes to use them up, including a miso soufflé — even though soufflés generally use more egg whites. “I know, I'm crazy.”

Neither of them takes a salary. “If we took a salary, we’d have to charge like 10 times the price,” Ong says. “We're just trying to build a brand first, and see whether Malaysia supports it.” 

The measure is meant to be temporary – she's clear she can't keep this up forever with two kids to provide for – but for now, salary is the first thing they cut, before anything touching the food.

Ong doesn't dress up what it costs. Her kids are five and seven. “I love my kids. But when I'm in the kitchen, I have to focus here. I have to work. If I don't work, if it doesn't succeed, there's no money for them either.” 

She “goes home, showers, cries, sleeps,” and starts again. “有的选，没有人会选的” — if given a choice, no one would choose this.

What doesn't get cut is the food itself. “If I have to cut something, it's working with a small team,” Ong says. “I can cover additional shifts myself, as long as the thing is done right.” 

Chua agrees. “We haven't been off for the past month,” he says, matter of factly. Salary, sleep, time, all of it is negotiable. Asked where they actually draw the line, Ong doesn't hesitate:

“We will never compromise on quality.”

Nude KL

10, Jalan Telawi 4, 

Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur.

Open daily, 11am-10pm

Tel: 011-2896 3699

Instagram: @nude_kl

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