Nurl Asyraffie: The Chef Bringing Fine-Dining Technique Back to Malay Food

Nurl Asyraffie Mohamed Shukor spent much of his professional career learning how other chefs cooked.

Iggy’s.

Corner House.

Gaggan in Bangkok.

Thevar.

These were serious kitchens where Asyraffie — often known as Affy — absorbed European technique, modern Asian cooking, fire, fermentation and the discipline of contemporary fine dining.

Eventually, however, he began asking a different question.

What could all of that technique do for Malay food?

That question produced Arang, his contemporary Malay private-dining concept, and later Kerabu by Arang, the Yishun hawker stall where a chef accustomed to elaborate tasting menus suddenly found himself grilling enormous quantities of chicken, lamb and fish over charcoal and coconut husks.

The formats could hardly have been more different.

The underlying philosophy was remarkably consistent.

Asyraffie was not trying to replace traditional Malay food.

He wanted to understand it deeply enough to express it in his own way.

Fourteen Years in Professional Kitchens

Asyraffie trained at SHATEC before beginning a career that would take him through some of Singapore and Asia's better-known restaurants.

A profile by My Turn to Host traces the early progression clearly: he began at Iggy's, spent approximately two years there, moved to Corner House, completed a shorter stint at Gaggan in Bangkok and later spent two and a half years at Thevar.

At Thevar, chef-owner Mano Thevar encouraged him to begin developing his own interpretations of contemporary Malay cuisine. Asyraffie subsequently tested those ideas through a pop-up before pursuing Arang full-time.

The same professional progression was documented by The Peak Singapore, which described the SHATEC-trained chef's movement through Iggy's, Corner House, Gaggan and Thevar before he established his own private-dining project.

Years later, Asyraffie summarised that period rather neatly himself.

In a LinkedIn reflection on his career, he described spending around 14 years in professional kitchens, much of that time cooking somebody else's food.

He had learned the techniques.

Now he needed to find his own culinary language.

For Asyraffie, that language was Malay.

Returning to the Food He Grew Up With

Malay food did not need rescuing in Asyraffie's view.

He has been quite explicit about that.

Traditional Malay cooking was already good. Someone wanting nasi padang, rendang, sambal or familiar kampung food did not need a fine-dining chef to validate it.

What interested Asyraffie was something else.

What would Malay cuisine look like through the eyes of a chef trained in contemporary restaurants?

My Turn to Host described his ambition as elevating modern Malay food through the combination of his professional F&B experience and his knowledge of the cuisine. The profile also records Asyraffie's conviction that the Malay culinary world extends far beyond the small group of dishes outsiders commonly associate with it.

The Malay Archipelago is enormous.

Its ingredients, regional differences and traditions provide much more territory to explore.

Asyraffie wanted to explore it.

That approach has parallels with contemporary restaurants such as Bottega di Carna, where tradition provides a foundation without requiring a chef to reproduce the past exactly as it was.

Asyraffie's foundation was Malay food.

His Mother Still Knows Things He Doesn't

For all his professional training, one of Asyraffie's most useful culinary references remained much closer to home.

His mother.

In an earlier CNA Lifestyle profile of Arang, Asyraffie explained that he would ask his mother what traditionally accompanied certain dishes or how particular foods would normally be eaten.

She knew things his restaurant education had never taught him.

His paternal grandmother from Negeri Sembilan was another influence, particularly through techniques such as making tempoyak, the fermented durian preparation found in parts of Malay cooking.

At Arang, Asyraffie made his own.

That intersection between inherited knowledge and professional technique became central to the way he cooked.

Asyraffie might understand dry-ageing, sauce construction and modern restaurant presentation.

His family understood the cultural logic underneath the flavours.

Neither completely replaced the other.

It is a relationship that appears in very different forms among chefs such as Antonio Manetto, whose Neapolitan background continues to shape the food he cooks in Singapore.

For Asyraffie, the inheritance was Malay.

But he wanted to build something new from it.

Arang

Asyraffie began developing Arang in 2021.

The name itself says something about the food.

Arang means charcoal in Malay.

Fire had already become part of his professional vocabulary through kitchens including barbecue-focused Fat Lulu's and Butcher Boy.

At Arang, fire became connected to the flavours and ingredients of Malay cooking.

After pop-ups, Asyraffie established a six-seat private-dining operation inside an apartment at Golden Mile Complex in September 2022.

The space was small.

The ambition was not.

The Peak described Asyraffie as attempting to bring Malay cuisine into a contemporary fine-dining framework, while My Turn to Host characterised Arang as part of his effort to elevate modern Malay cooking.

The concept quickly attracted attention.

In his later LinkedIn account, Asyraffie recalled serving around 160 dinners during the Golden Mile period, with every sitting selling out.

Malay Food Through Another Lens

Arang gave Asyraffie permission to pull familiar ideas apart and reconstruct them.

A kuih bakar berlauk could involve mud crab, uni or caviar.

Nasi kerabu could arrive with short-rib rendang.

Laksam could become the inspiration for a sauce served with Hokkaido scallops.

Tempoyak could appear alongside pumpkin and cassava leaves.

An ikan percik preparation could draw upon the golden snapper his mother cooked when he was younger.

CNA's profile of Arang was particularly useful in documenting the technical work underneath these dishes.

For one laksam-inspired preparation, Asyraffie dry-aged Spanish mackerel, grilled it, blended it with rempah and coconut milk, then cooked the mixture slowly over fire before using it as the foundation of the finished sauce.

The plating was contemporary.

The process still travelled deeply into Malay cooking.

That distinction matters.

Asyraffie was not simply placing caviar on Malay food and calling it modern.

He was interrogating the cuisine with the same seriousness that fine-dining kitchens routinely apply to French, Japanese or Italian traditions.

The precision may be worlds apart stylistically from Sushi Sakuta, but the underlying impulse is similar.

Understand every component.

Then decide deliberately what should change.

The Food Was Not Designed for Purists

Asyraffie knew some diners would find the food strange.

Even his parents sometimes did.

CNA recorded him laughing about his mother's reaction to his reinterpretations of familiar dishes. She could recognise the flavour underneath while questioning what exactly her son had done to it.

That did not particularly bother him.

Arang was not intended to replace traditional Malay cuisine.

It represented Malay cuisine through Asyraffie's eyes.

That distinction gave him room to incorporate ingredients such as uni, caviar and Japanese seafood without pretending they belonged historically to Malay cooking.

The heritage existed elsewhere.

Rempah.

Coconut.

Fermentation.

Sambal.

Fire.

Herbs.

Acidity.

Regional ingredients.

Those formed the vocabulary.

Asyraffie simply constructed different sentences with them.

Looking Beyond Familiar Malay Ingredients

My Turn to Host also documented Asyraffie's interest in ingredients from across the wider Malay and Indonesian culinary world.

One example was Andaliman pepper from Medan.

With its citrus character and tongue-numbing quality, the ingredient can invite comparisons with Sichuan peppercorn.

Asyraffie used it with cured hamachi, smoking and ageing the fish before finishing it with the pepper.

This gives another clue to his approach.

Contemporary Malay food, in Asyraffie's mind, did not have to be confined to the handful of dishes most commonly encountered in Singapore.

The region itself could become a pantry.

Recognition Beyond the Dining Room

Asyraffie's approach also began attracting attention outside conventional restaurant coverage.

Prestige Singapore included Nurl Asyraffie in its 40 Under 40 series, recognition that came while he was developing a professional identity increasingly associated with contemporary Malay cuisine.

That matters less as an award than as an indication of where his work was beginning to sit culturally.

Asyraffie was no longer simply a cook with a strong résumé.

He was becoming associated with a wider conversation about what modern Malay food in Singapore could become.

A Private Dining Room Built Around Labour

Arang was extraordinarily labour-intensive.

The six-seat format could make private dining sound almost leisurely compared with a large restaurant.

It wasn't.

CNA documented the weekly routine.

Marketing.

Cleaning.

Blending rempah.

Going to the market.

Heavy preparation.

Cooking.

Serving.

Changing plates.

Cleaning the kitchen.

Cleaning the dining space.

Even cleaning the toilet.

Asyraffie did practically everything.

Guests paid around S$185 per person, but expensive ingredients and the labour involved meant the operation was hardly an easy route to wealth.

At that stage of his career, Asyraffie was primarily trying to establish what his food could become.

When the Restaurant Almost Happened

The Golden Mile operation eventually had to end when the tenancy expired.

A permanent restaurant appeared to be the natural next step.

As documented in CNA Lifestyle's later profile of Kerabu by Arang, Asyraffie came remarkably close to securing one.

He described a proposed investment arrangement as approximately 85 per cent confirmed.

Then came the ownership question.

The investor wanted a controlling stake.

Asyraffie refused.

He had spent years building Arang and did not believe surrendering majority control was the right price for obtaining a restaurant.

The deal collapsed.

By then, he had already sold kitchen equipment in preparation for the project.

Disappointed, Asyraffie travelled to Thailand, trained, exercised and reconsidered what he wanted to do next.

The answer would be almost the opposite of a S$185 tasting menu.

From S$185 to S$8.50

In November 2023, Asyraffie opened Kerabu by Arang at Yishun Park Hawker Centre.

The change in scale was enormous.

At Arang, diners had paid around S$185 per person.

At Kerabu by Arang, the introductory chicken set cost S$8.50.

CNA asked Asyraffie directly whether becoming a hawker felt like a step down.

It did not.

His parents could finally bring their friends to eat his food. The cooking was understandable in a way that an intimate contemporary tasting menu sometimes wasn't.

And most importantly, substantially more people could afford it.

The accessibility question had changed.

This was no longer about attracting six diners into Golden Mile.

It was about feeding a hawker centre.

The same tension between distinctive cooking and accessibility appears elsewhere in Singapore through concepts such as Claypot Daddy, where familiar formats create room for a much more individual culinary identity.

Kerabu by Arang pushed that idea particularly far.

Why Nasi Kerabu?

Asyraffie chose one central dish.

Nasi kerabu.

CNA reported that he had already sold nasi kerabu through a home-based business during the pandemic.

He liked the dish.

It was also less ubiquitous in Singapore than nasi lemak.

His hawker version changed parts of the traditional structure.

Instead of the familiar blue-pea-coloured rice, Asyraffie served nasi kunyit, or turmeric rice.

Around it were ulam, keropok, sambal budu, salted egg and proteins cooked over charcoal.

Chicken.

Pomfret.

Lamb ribs.

The plate remained recognisably nasi kerabu.

But it was unmistakably his.

Thailand, Malaysia and the Grill

Asyraffie's understanding of Malay cuisine was also shaped by travel.

Kelantan.

Terengganu.

Kuala Lumpur.

Melaka.

Thailand.

One recurring lesson was the importance of grilling within many regional forms of everyday cooking.

At Kerabu by Arang, Asyraffie leaned heavily into fire.

Chicken and lamb were grilled over charcoal and coconut husks.

Pomfret could be wrapped in banana leaf before being placed over the heat, protecting the delicate flesh while introducing additional aroma.

The relationship with fire makes for an interesting comparison with Dave Pynt at Burnt Ends.

Their cuisines are completely different.

Their understanding of fire shares something fundamental.

Smoke is an ingredient.

Heat changes flavour.

And the cook has to understand what the fire is doing.

The Salad Was Not Decoration

One of the most revealing parts of Asyraffie's nasi kerabu was the ulam.

It would have been easy to treat the salad as garnish.

Instead, he built it around balance.

CNA documented a mixture drawing upon both Thai and Malay influences.

Raw beans provided crunch.

Pomegranate contributed acidity and sweetness.

Pomelo introduced citrus and freshness.

That mattered because the rest of the plate could be intense.

Smoky grilled meat.

Percik sauce.

Salted egg.

Fermented budu.

Without freshness, the meal risked becoming heavy.

The salad solved the problem.

It is a fine-dining way of thinking expressed through hawker food:

every component needs a reason to be there.

Hawker Customers Wanted Something Different

The transition from fine dining to hawker food also confronted Asyraffie with an entirely different customer psychology.

CNA recorded his observation rather clearly.

Fine-dining customers often want to hear where an ingredient came from.

Hawker diners typically want food that is fast, affordable and filling.

That distinction created friction.

Asyraffie's chicken might spend hours in brine before being marinated overnight.

The customer saw rice, chicken and salted egg.

Some wondered why it cost more than another hawker meal.

The chef saw the labour behind it.

For the opening period, Asyraffie said his prices effectively covered food costs and that he was not drawing a salary.

He was trying to earn trust before earning margin.

Hawker Cooking Taught Him What Restaurants Hadn't

Years later, Asyraffie's own LinkedIn reflection gave the hawker period another dimension.

He described working from a stall of around 10 square metres, processing approximately 50kg of chicken, 15kg of pomfret and 20kg of lamb ribs every two days.

That scale taught him things Michelin-starred kitchens had not.

Pricing.

Menu engineering.

Volume.

Customer behaviour.

Operating inside extreme spatial constraints.

The importance of repeat business.

Fine dining had taught him technique.

Hawking taught him another part of the restaurant business entirely.

Two Expressions of the Same Idea

In the original CNA coverage, Asyraffie imagined Arang and Kerabu eventually existing together.

Arang would represent the premium expression.

Kerabu would be more accessible.

That is useful because it demonstrates that he never considered the hawker stall a repudiation of his earlier work.

They answered different questions.

Arang asked:

How far can contemporary Malay cuisine be pushed?

Kerabu asked:

How many people can we bring into it?

One needed tweezers.

The other needed volume.

Both belonged to the same chef.

Kerabu by Arang Closed

Kerabu by Arang has since closed.

But Asyraffie's own recent account of the experience makes it difficult to treat the closure as the end of his culinary story.

In his LinkedIn reflection, he describes the hawker operation as another stage in his education and returns repeatedly to the possibilities he still sees within Malay cuisine.

As of August 2026, there is no newer permanent Nurl Asyraffie restaurant or hawker operation that we can confidently identify from the available sources.

That is worth stating plainly.

There is no reason to invent the next chapter before he does.

Fourteen Years of Other People's Food

Perhaps the most revealing description of Asyraffie's career comes from the chef himself.

Fourteen years in professional kitchens.

Most of them spent cooking somebody else's food.

There is nothing unusual about that.

It is how chefs learn.

A young cook follows one system.

Then another.

Then another.

Eventually enough technique accumulates that the question changes.

Not:

How does this chef cook?

But:

What do I want to cook?

For Asyraffie, the answer was the food he had grown up around.

Malay food.

But filtered through everything that happened afterwards.

A New Malay Culinary Language

Asyraffie's work belongs to a wider movement in which chefs treat culinary heritage as a living vocabulary rather than something that can only be preserved unchanged.

That does not mean tradition is unimportant.

It means tradition provides the grammar.

The chef still decides what to say.

There are echoes of this throughout contemporary Asian dining, including restaurants such as Burma Social and Eden Restaurant, where regional flavours are expressed through contemporary restaurant language without necessarily being presented as untouched reproductions of the past.

Asyraffie's focus is specifically Malay.

And he has already explored it from opposite ends of Singapore's dining world.

A S$185 private dinner.

An S$8.50 hawker plate.

Caviar.

Salted egg.

Tweezers.

Charcoal.

The formats changed dramatically.

The question underneath them never did.

What Comes After Kerabu?

There is something appropriate about the fact that Nurl Asyraffie's story remains unfinished.

The chef who spent years cooking other people's food is still determining the permanent form of his own.

Arang demonstrated that contemporary Malay cuisine could sustain an ambitious tasting experience.

Kerabu by Arang demonstrated that the same chef could strip away much of the ceremony and cook for a hawker crowd.

His recognition in Prestige Singapore's 40 Under 40, his profiles with My Turn to Host and The Peak, the detailed reporting by CNA Lifestyle, and Asyraffie's own later reflections all point towards the same larger project.

He is still figuring out what contemporary Malay food can look like when it is completely his own.

French technique.

Modern Asian cooking.

Indian kitchens.

Regional Malay ingredients.

Fermentation.

Travel.

Charcoal.

His mother's advice.

His grandmother's tempoyak.

Fourteen years of professional experience.

Kerabu by Arang may have closed.

Nurl Asyraffie's project is much larger than a stall.