PETALING JAYA, Jan 4 — Vintage furniture collected from small towns around the country. Stools from the 1950s which were previously part of a private collection. A feature wall which is effectively a vertical garden. These are just some of the features that makes Awesome Canteen look awesome.
Design firm colleagues Diane Ong, Janice Tyan, Dora Ong, Joshua Tan, Fion Sia, Raymond Loo and Sheay Nee Lee decided to put their creativity to work when they started out Awesome Canteen, a two-month-old café that serves Western fare in the old neighbourhood of Taman Paramount.
Before starting this new venture, Ong said that whenever the team felt stressed out at work, they would have cook-outs in the evenings!
Their shared love for food and the ability to work together led them to the decision to start a restaurant together. Ong roped in her husband Raymond Chang and Jack Weldie, a chef formerly attached to a Japanese restaurant, to join in their culinary adventure.
So what inspired the look and feel of Awesome Canteen?
“We took a lot of references from the Internet,” said Ong.
“Diane wanted people to feel warm when they stepped into the place. Everything looks familiar, like it’s been used before, something vintage,” added Tyan.
“When people walk through the the door, they shouldn’t feel like it’s a very new shop. You get a bit taken aback when you see a brand new, sparkling restaurant. Is the food good? You start to scrutinise it, the kitchen hasn’t warmed up yet. So I decided to cut that off and make the restaurant look a little bit rustic and vintage,” said Ong.
Since some of them already owned some old stools from their own personal collection, Ong encouraged them to find more of those stools which are very common in Penang. Because the stools are old, they were not in very good condition even though the restaurateurs managed to source for them. They were all rusty and dented and it took two days to polish and restore them.
It only took two months for Awesome Canteen to be completed from the time Ong found the shoplot in Taman Paramount; it was previously a barber and an acupuncture centre. Ong and Tyan are also part of a woodwork and photograph business called Momage where they make lightboxes made of recycled wood and pictures.
The tables at Awesome Canteen are actually old cupboard door frames which were made by the same carpenter in Johor who helps Ong and Tyan with Momage’s creations.
“The cupboards are from the 1980s,” said Tyan who was very adamant about having the tables made that way. Initially when she suggested it, the rest of the team at Awesome Canteen were against it because they said it would be hard to clean and they weren’t sure about the sturdiness of the structure.
But it’s all good now that they decided to go with the idea. “Everyone at Awesome Canteen is designated to certain tasks which they are good at. We have an online forum where anyone of us can give a suggestion and we would discuss to see if the idea works or not. All of us are also given a particular budget per item so that we are able to keep the costs within the budget,” said Ong.
Awesome Canteen even made use of the furnishing left behind by the previous tenants. The hanging lights are actually down lights that were originally in the building. Instead of using the down lights as is, Tyan did the wiring and turned them into hanging lights. The old-school light switches are sourced from Penang.
Ong said that most of the items are re-used and upcycled. The team D-I-Y the items whenever they can, turning them into something useful while retaining the retro feel.
Yes, the idea is to keep true to the spirit of the design and upcycle some of the original building elements.
They maintained the Louvre windows, changing the panes because the old ones had paint over them. The metal table you see now that’s in front of the vertical garden was actually an iron structure that was obstructing the kitchen.
It was twice the size of what it is now but they managed to get a welder to turn it into a table.
Momage lightboxes are also part of the décor, of course. Actually, the light boxes – including the vintage stationery in the glass display – are for sale but Ong decided not to promote that yet because she said it would “feel like I’m advertising instead of serving food.”
The only challenge now is to reduce the echo in the place. “We are going to put in more plants to minimise the echo,” said Tyan.
Awesome Canteen even has a “private dining” area which is where they installed the sun roof and the vertical garden. The plants absorb the sound and reduces the echo so it’s quieter in that area.
Every table on Awesome Canteen has a cactus – different varieties on each one – planted in “pots.”
“They are actually traditional Chinese medicine drawers,” said Tyan. She said that she got them from the same carpenter in Johor who is an avid collector of antiques too.
Unlike other restaurants where they use brown glass bottles for water, Ong actually hunted down a lab supplier to get lab bottles that look like they are from an apothecary.
“We want to be different from other restaurants. What you see here is things we like, our dreams put together,” said Ong.
And that itself is awesome.
Awesome Canteen
19, Jalan 20/13, Taman Paramount
46300 Petaling Jaya, Malaysia
Opens 11am to 10pm daily except Wednesdays
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Awesome-Canteen/537315976360362
This story was first published in Crave in the print edition of The Malay Mail on January 3, 2014
