Malaysian classics, made from scratch
This spring, we’re delivering good stories from the DoorDash community, from merchants growing their business, one order at a time, to all-star Dashers making their dreams come true. Here, meet Kay Tan, owner of Black Pepper and Banana Leaf, two Malaysian restaurants in Northern California featured on DoorDash.
Kay Tan emerges from the kitchen at Black Pepper in Menlo Park with a flaky, impossibly light, golden roti and a side of fragrant curry sauce for dipping. She’s elevated the Malaysian street-food staple into an appetizer that’s next level, the kind of thing you marvel at and start craving (and dream about ordering again) even before you’ve even finished the first one.
Kay, along with her husband and Black Pepper head chef, David Yim, made their first foray as restaurant owners in 1998 when they opened Banana Leaf in Milpitas, not far from San Jose. The restaurant specializes in the kind of dishes Kay grew up eating in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where she immigrated from in 1987 — all made from scratch every day using recipes passed down to Kay from her mother.
We sat down with Kay to talk about her journey from Malaysia to the Bay Area, her passion for customer service and how being ignored by a potential employer for three hours ended up being the catalyst for a restaurant career that has spanned over 30 years.
Tell me about your background. How did you end up in the Bay Area?
I came here after high school graduation. During that time, every young kid had a dream to go abroad, you know, to see the world. I came with a high school friend to San Francisco. I wanted to study ESL and eventually go to college. I started to look for a place to work, because I needed money. People said, oh, you can be a babysitter, or you can work in a restaurant or something like that. I was very young, so nobody wanted to hire me to be a babysitter. [laughs]
I ended up getting a job on Market Street in San Francisco. They’re no longer there, but it was a huge restaurant. They had a full-service Chinese restaurant. Another section of it was self-serve — American food, Mexican food, Filipino food, Chinese food. To work there, they said, “Go talk to the boss lady and ask if they have a job opening.” I was sitting there for literally almost three hours waiting for her. She told me to go sit over there, but she was very busy and then she forgot about me so 3 hours later she said that she was very sorry, and why don’t you come in and work tomorrow? Back then it was very hard to find a job. I’d been to many shops and nobody wanted to hire me.
I got my first job working in the Filipino section there, in the self-serve area. I helped by washing dishes, I finished cooking and helped customers. It was very hard work, but I liked it. I enjoyed the interaction with customers. Later, I started working as waitstaff. They told me, f you want to make more money, you want to be a waitress. On top of your hourly wages, you get tips. So I learned to be a busser, then I became a waitress. I was going to college, City College, and then I went to San Francisco State. I also spent about two or three years bartending, in different bars. Sometimes, I would go to school and then work two jobs.
What were you studying?
I took business marketing, and got my Bachelor of Science in Business Administration with a concentration in Marketing. Then I graduated and found a job in Fremont, at a computer company launching their new products. They hired me as their marketing person. I moved down to San Jose, and worked there for almost six years. I did very well. My boss transferred me from marketing to sales, because he saw how I took care of the customers for a new product. We were doing market research to see how a product would do. I wasn’t getting a commision, but I was really doing a lot, taking care of the customers, providing as much information as I could and collecting information from them to find out what they thought about the product. So my boss said, I think you can be a salesperson, so he moved me to sales, where I made a lot more money.
Were you thinking about food at any point, like, oh, I miss the restaurants?
Yes, I enjoyed my job working in restaurants, although it was hard work. I just enjoy the interaction with people a lot. Before I opened Banana Leaf, I worked for a Russian company doing purchasing. At that time, I was dating my husband — we were just boyfriend and girlfriend then, we met in church — I told him that I really liked the restaurant business, and that I wished one day to have my own restaurant. But I knew that to open a restaurant, you needed to have a lot of capital, and I didn’t have the money. I had just graduated and was working, doing okay, but it didn’t allow me to have enough money to open a restaurant. So he said, “Oh, I will support you. I will give you whatever I have to make this happen.” So we got married in 1997 and in 1998, I started planning for the restaurant with all his money. He was a computer engineer. His last job was at Cisco, for 16 years as a senior engineer. He gave everything that he had to me so that I could open Banana Leaf in Milpitas. We opened in June 1999.
When you opened Banana Leaf, what were you thinking in terms of the type of food you wanted to offer?
Well, I’m Malaysian — I’m from Kuala Lumpur. I wanted to have the food that we ate growing up. Curry, roti, all the spices that I’m very familiar with. So I knew I wanted to open a Malaysian restaurant, something I missed having. I thought it would be a great cuisine to serve the community, because there weren’t really any Malaysian restaurants. Even now, there are very, very few in the Bay Area.
Did you change anything about the way you make Malaysian food here in the Bay Area versus when you were growing up? For example, do you find different ingredients here? Or have you blended California and Malaysian cuisine?
We are lucky here in the Bay Area that we are able to get a lot of different herbs and spices, because we have the Indian, Thai and Vietnamese communities. We share a lot of similar spices, so we can have lemongrass from the Thai community, tumeric from the Indian community, tamarind, kaffir lime leaf — and that’s what we use in Malaysia. There are certain things we may have to make special arrangements for, but the majority of things we are able to find locally.
It’s probably quite similar in Malaysia, where you have a combination of different influences like in California.
Yes, that’s right. Curry leaf is a tree and we use it for curry when we cook. The Indian community uses it all the time, and we can find it here. The food we serve is very authentic — that’s how I like it. For example, the sambal belachan is Malaysian shrimp paste that takes over a day to prepare. We make that here. No shortcuts. My mom taught me a lot of things in cooking, and I follow the recipes just the way it is supposed to be. We also make our roti from scratch. We make the dough and let it sit overnight, and then when the order comes, we make it.
Tell me about some of your favorite dishes.
This is the food I grew up eating — I could eat it everyday. Roti is a popular thing in Malaysia that they now serve 24/7. They have different shifts of people who come in, on the street, to make roti. I make our roti slightly healthier, with less oil. In Malaysia, it’s thicker. People sometimes eat roti like a meal. Here, we serve it as an appetizer, so I wanted it to be as healthy as possible. It’s very light. Our nasi lemak is a banana leaf rice combination with rendang short ribs. It’s something we would eat early in the morning, like 5 a.m. We start having coconut rice, with peanuts, and egg, and anchovies, and chili sambal. We had customers from Malaysia, including my mom, who said, “Wow, your nasi lemak is very, very good.” So I’m proud of that. And then Chinese food like char kway teow, a rice noodle dish, does very well. We also have mee goreng, which are Indian noodles and curry laksa, a soup.
In Malaysia, when I was growing up, we hardly went to restaurants — it was very fancy. We usually ate at home or on the street, so we didn’t get to eat scallops or fish. But here [at Black Pepper], we serve excellent scallops in the sambal belachan sauce, or our peanut sauce, which is made from the belachan sauce, but we make it a creamy and rich, almost like French food. We serve it with top-quality scallops, so it’s very, very good.
And then we have the famous Singaporean chili crabs and black pepper crabs. We have a fish tank, so we serve live crabs and lobster. Hainan chicken is also very popular. We use free-range chickens — all the chicken we serve is non-GMO — and they’ve never been frozen before, so it’s very, very good chicken. You steam them, and then you chop them with the bones, and you serve it with special chili on the side and Hainan rice.
Where does the name Black Pepper come from?
At Banana Leaf, we were serving these black pepper crabs and people loved them so much that they asked if we could do black pepper beef, and chicken. Sometimes during lunch, people don’t have time to eat the whole crab. We started serving Singaporean black pepper beef, black pepper chicken, and people just loved it. We do lamb, scallops, sea bass and halibut, and it became a very popular dish. So when we opened this place last year, we thought it was kind of a cool name, so we called it “Black Pepper.”
You talked about some your early food memories growing up in Malaysia, like nasi lamak. Are there other influences that your family has had on the dishes here?
Yes, my mom was a great cook. She spent most of her time in the kitchen preparing food for us, and I helped her a lot in the kitchen — I enjoyed doing that, so it’s a great memory — she passed away. She made excellent curry, and asam, which is a tamarind sauce. She also made excellent chili crabs, chili sauce, and belachan [shrimp paste]. She also loved to make cakes. When I was young, we made cakes together.
So your mom passed along all the recipes?
Yes. When I was in junior high or high school, my mom started going to work, so I was doing a lot of food for the whole family. She would call and say, oh, take the fish out from the fridge, or take the chicken out, and I would prepare them. You don’t even realize that you eventually you pick up a lot of things from your mom.
Here at the restaurant, do you do all the cooking in the kitchen, or does your husband also help? How do you guys work together?
My husband joined Banana Leaf four years after the restaurant was open. I’m not physically able to keep up with the demand. I got injured a few times when I was young — not in the restaurant, but I had a few accidents. We needed somebody, a head chef in kitchen. We talked and we prayed about it, so David decided to quit his job at Cisco and go into the kitchen. I taught him how to do the dishes. He was a very good cook already. He had been cooking at church, and he loves to cook, too, so it was very easy for him to pick up the skills. He prepares all the major ingredients for the restaurant. But with a lot of the new dishes, we worked together on the recipes.
How do you juggle having the two different locations?
It’s hard, but David does it more — he goes to both locations. I like to be on both sides evenly, but Black Pepper is still very new and a little understaffed, so we’re still trying to establish the business. I want to be around to make sure things go well and attend to customers, the food and the orders.
How has your partnership with DoorDash changed your business?
I’ve worked with DoorDash for about three years. I think it’s great, DoorDash is bringing in more revenue and more customers. And some people may want our food, but aren’t able to pick it up, so DoorDash has been a very good service [for them]. We get to do more business, and customers get to enjoy our food. It’s wonderful.
What are your big dreams for 2018? Any plans to expand, or maybe take a vacation?
Well, I love the vacation part! But in 2018, hopefully we don’t need to work that hard. Right now I’m working around the clock — every day, almost 13, 14 hours. It’s a lot of work and I think we need to have a little space so that we can be inspired and come up with new, creative dishes. At this moment, we’re just trying our best to build Black Pepper and do better, build out the team, and hopefully we’ll get some free time, too, to experience something new.
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