KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 9 — While the clamour for speciality coffee hasn’t died down, the announcement of yet another café serving flat whites or filter brews doesn’t excite the way it used to. But what about a new café that focuses on chocolate?
That’s the promise of Seniman Kakao’s first café (its soft opening will be on February 10) by Michael Wilson, the veteran coffee purveyor behind Artisan Roast.
To be clear, this isn’t a Korean-style chocolate dessert shop. Instead of chocolate mass-produced from bulk-roasted inferior beans, expect bean-to-bar chocolate crafted from single origin Malaysian cacao.
Instead of hot chocolate, typically made from cocoa and sugar, look out for “drinking chocolate” that is made by melting real chocolate and blending it in real milk.
Basically, expect artisanal chocolate with lots of interesting flavours... similar to what you’ve come to expect from artisanal coffee.
The café is located at Jalan Pudu Lama, housed on two floors of an old colonial building. Entering the shop, one is immediately drawn to the courtyard, suffused as it is with natural light. Upstairs the café has a more intimate ambience. The entire space is a labour of love.
Wilson shares, “We’ve tried to maintain the charm of the building with the design. We have all the nooks and crannies for people to lepak, as you’d expect, and we’ve got a chocolate making area for future workshops, a retail area, chocolate on tap, kombucha on tap, and an education counter where we’ll be offering tastings.”
This is Seniman Kakao’s first foray into a chocolate-centric café, which will be run by Nona Zainuddin, a former manager from Artisan Roast.
Wilson says, “Nona has been in charge of getting the whole place ready so she’s stolen half of the Artisan Roast team! Our online shop launched recently and we’ll be looking to export in the next two years.”
Besides the brick-and-mortar and online retail, the Seniman Kakao business operations have remained small-scale, with their team concentrating on extracting higher quality chocolate from Malaysian cacao.
Wilson notes, “We’ve spent a lot of time out in the field and experimenting with fermentation and we’ve learnt a lot from Malaysian farmers, Lembaga Koko and from other bean-to-bar manufacturers.”
Seniman Kakao has also been expanding the reach of their distribution to include various cafés and hotels in Malaysia. Their drinking chocolate, which has a fruity acidity, is available at many coffee spots in town; you can even get it in Muar, at The Hungry Nest Café.
Beyond Klang Valley, their vegan chocolate bars are stocked as far away as Penang, such as Ome by Spacebar Coffee in George Town and Coffeeric in Bayan Lepas. Nama-style chocolate truffles by Cocoraw uses single origin cacao sourced by Seniman Kakao from Pahang.
In the past five years since Seniman Kakao first launched, Wilson has strengthened his belief in the viability and exceptional quality of Malaysian cacao. He recalls, “When we first tried Malaysian cacao it made terrible chocolate and for a while we imported the beans from Trinidad, Ecuador and Papua New Guinea. Now, I’m proud to say, that we only use Malaysian cacao.”
The raw cacao that is sourced from Malaysian farms are first fermented to convert sugars in the pulp into alcohol. The alcohol is in turn converted by bacteria into free amino acids, resulting in the chocolate’s eventual flavour profile.
These cacao beans are then dried, roasted and winnowed; this last part involves breaking the roasted beans into cocoa nibs (cacao is called cocoa after roasting). The nibs are then ground, conched and finally tempered to produce a high quality chocolate. No one said bean-to-bar was an easy or quick process!
The defining moment for Wilson came when he ate one of Seniman Kakao’s own bon-bons, mistaking it for chocolate from a Vietnamese producer he admired. He says, “I thought it was the best they’d made. That was when I became truly proud to be producing chocolate from Malaysian cacao.”
Today, Wilson and his Seniman Kakao team invest more time than ever connecting with Malaysian cacao farmers. He says, “We’ve had farmers asking us to help them ferment and it’s great to see people who grow the product looking to improve what they’re doing. Together, we can make delicious speciality chocolate and convince everyone that Malaysian cacao can be the best in the world.”
Seniman Kakao Café
29, Jalan Pudu Lama, Bukit Bintang, Kuala Lumpur
Soft opening on February 10, 2019; from 10am onwards. Check their websites for updated hours.
