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[title]“My cooking is ‘neo Asian,’” says Borneo-born chef Esca Khoo. It’s “a bit like New Nordic” in the way foraged and fermented ingredients are used, he says. But “more a loose interpretation of Asian ingredients that doesn’t follow the rules.”
Until May 2022, Khoo was head chef at Miss Mi, the Mövenpick Hotel restaurant in Melbourne. He quickly gained recognition for a dish he calls “Half my life in Malaysia, half my life in Australia” – a barbecued kangaroo skewer in Vegemite glaze topped with avocado and a macadamia nut satay.
These days, Khoo’s running pop-ups around Melbourne. “I cook what these restaurants are known for, but I put the Esca in,” he says. Coming up, a Chinese-Italian mashup at Hardware Club and a Muslim/Arabic menu with Tom Sarafian at an undecided venue. Follow him on Instagram at @foodtureproof if you’re keen.
They’re “just for fun,” the 30-year-old says. He’s keeping himself busy until he opens a 12-seat degustation-only restaurant “somewhere in Malaysia” that’s backed by an unnamed billionaire. “Everything I learned in Australia will be represented in this restaurant,” he says. “It’s crazy to think, I had never really been a head chef and I was cooking in a hotel restaurant. And yet, somehow magically [cooking] has given me all these opportunities. I can’t believe it.”
Despite stints at Noma Sydney, Dinner by Heston and George Calombaris’s Press Club (where he was hired as a commis chef and almost immediately put in charge of the test kitchen), Khoo’s path up the culinary ladder was not an easy one, nor was it even his plan.
In 2007, 15-year-old Khoo dreamed of becoming a professional soccer player. His parents agreed to send him to Australia, where he hoped to get scouted, on one condition: he had to get a job. “I started working in kitchens, just washing dishes, and I saved enough to show that I could put in the effort.”
Three years later, he was busking on the streets for grocery money (think Bend It Like Beckham with a hat out) and his visa status was on shaky ground. “I chose to study cooking, because I wasn’t interested in high school,” Khoo says. He’d watched a lot of Jamie Oliver and Anthony Bourdain as a kid, so he had some interest in cheffing. “On the TV, everyone was so happy and smiling. But I didn’t know it wasn’t going to be like that.
“It was a real grind, to finish school, to get a visa,” says Khoo, who became an Australian citizen this year. He didn’t have a CV, or any work experience. No one would return his calls or emails. For a while, he worked in "an old dirty factory that made processed food”.
Australian-born chefs don’t know how easy they have it, he says. “They can work in the best restaurants straight away. I had to give up my [soccer] dream, and for a while my cooking dream, to make Australia my dream.” He flipped burgers and washed even more dishes.
Miss Mi was the first opportunity Khoo had to cook his own food. That’s why he said yes to the job, despite the red flags (hotel restaurant, meaningless name, a lot of big egos, a random dumpling sign). “It was the biggest risk I had ever taken,” he says. But upon exit, his proudest achievement wasn’t the Good Food hat (The Age reviewer Besha Rodell gave the restaurant 15/20) or knowing he could finally get a job in whatever restaurant he wanted.
“We created cool food in a space where creativity was high and the most important thing was happiness,” he says. “It was fun, everyone was happy. I was always called names, I was told I was too slow, told not good enough. None of these words were ever used at Miss Mi. We were reinventing the Australian kitchen experience.”