I just got back from Penang after spending the long weekend there. Spent some good quality time with my parents who I now only get to see not more than once a month. Parents are like that: Like they’re really happy to see you and really happy whenever you’re back home. What they also like to do sometimes is to take you out for lunch or dinner with their friends.

Yesterday I went followed my mum and her friends for lunch at this really interesting restaurant somewhere in town. I can’t remember now what it’s called but I was really inspired by the story behind the restaurant.

Here it goes. The owner who is also the chef and a Datuk is a very famous and successful businessman in Penang, He’s more widely known in Penang as the “Jostick King” because he is the main supplier for all the josticks that Buddhists in Penang use for prayer. He’s also in quite a number of other businesses and has a big house on a hill.

Interesting thing about him is that he loves cooking so much that even the kitchen he has at home is apparently like some commercial restaurant kitchen with all the equipment any chef could ask for. So one day, he decided that because he liked cooking so much, he was going to start his own restaurant and be the chef for it.

That’s right. He’s the actual chef in his own restaurant.

Here are some of the dishes he had at his restaurant.

Some prawn with Mayo salad and crab ball thingy.

His very famous Hokkien mee.

And Hainanese Chicken rice 🙂

What’s even more cool is that a lot of his friends always have known him to be a really good cook so they come regularly just to eat at his new restaurant. He has the usual menu for but for his friends he has a special menu that changes every day. He basically doesn’t tell you how many dishes there are going to be, or what he’s cooking. He just looks at what fresh ingredients he got in the market that morning and cooks whatever he feels like cooking. So if he got really fresh fish that morning, he would cook something with fish.

The food was great but what I couldn’t get my mind over was this amazing story. I mean here you have someone in his 50s or so who has worked hard and earned a lot of money all his life. He has a hobby which is cooking and he decided to take that hobby to a whole new level. Not to just own a restaurant, but to be the chef of his very own restaurant.

That is… quite a story.

What would you like to do one day if you had earned all the money you needed?