This self-taught chef in Sabah is working hard to drive a culinary narrative that champions the state's local cuisine and ingredients.
There is a reason why they say home is where your heart is. Home has little to do with geography and far more to do with a sense of comfort, warmth and belonging. Sometimes a home becomes a home without you even realising it.
Just ask the formidable Linn Yong, a former big-city gal who is now a strong advocate of Sabah, her home of two decades.
A passionate, talented chef and mum-of-two, Yong is originally from Johor but spent her formative years travelling to and from Johor and Singapore – where she was formally educated.
She even went to college in Singapore and studied to be an industrial designer, a job she worked at until two decades ago, when her husband decided the time was ripe for him to go home to Sabah.
“My husband is originally from Sabah and he decided to come home and be closer with the family as he had been abroad for a long, long time as well.
“So then, you know, we inherited like an old family hotel in Sandakan called Nak Hotel that was built in the 1960s. My husband and I are from a design background, and when we went up to the rooftop, we thought, ‘Oh, you know, this is really nice place!’
“Back then, I was a big city girl and I had to move to a small little town and it was really difficult for me. So I thought, ‘Why not just build myself a nice little haven?’” says Yong.
Yong is a slow food convivia representative for Borneo and seeks to preserve Sabah's rich culinary heritage. — LINN YONG
That haven ended up being the beautiful Ba Lin Roofgarden in Sandakan. But having an F&B space was not without its challenges. The first cook that Yong hired was problematic and the second one turned up to work drunk.
Fed up, Yong decided to become a chef herself.
“So I’m like, you know what? I’m going to figure this out myself. So yeah, in the early days it was a lot of YouTubing. Basically, anyone with a passion for food would pretty much do the same thing. You just do your research from whatever materials you have,” she says.
Since those foundling years, Yong has developed Ba Lin as well as a modern kopitiam called San Da Gen Kopitiam that specialises in modernizing traditional pastries.
When she had been in business for 10 years, Yong’s interests started to diverge – she developed a keen passion for the environment and for championing sustainable Sabah ingredients. But there was no market for that in Sandakan.
So she set up Limau & Linen in Kota Kinabalu and now travels back and forth, in a cycle that is crazily similar to her childhood days.
At Limau & Linen, Yong tries to introduce the idea of sustainability and appreciating Sabahan ingredients in a quiet, holistic way without preaching too much.— Photos: ABIRAMI DURAI/The Star
“I’ve got a five-year-old and a 12-year-old who are in Sandakan. So, yeah, it’s hard. I mean, dealing with the ‘mum guilt’, you know, it’s quite hard.
“But I do travel back and forth to the two cities quite easily because Limau & Linen was about the right condition and the right opportunity.
“And where Limau and Linen is – this is a perfect neighborhood because it’s kind of higher echelon, there’s a lot of expats, which means the customers are more open to sustainable practices and maybe a little bit more progressive-thinking. So yeah, when the location came about, I thought, ‘Okay, maybe it’s worth a shot, right?’” she says.
At Limau & Linen, Yong tries to espouse sustainable practices and ideals as well as promote the idea of eating whole foods. Anything that she can find locally, she uses.
“What we want to do is to get diners to also learn how to appreciate what we have in Sabah. I think it makes a lot of sense for chefs to be talking about these issues because everyone has to eat. And we’re in an environment where we meet people from all walks of life."
Yong is a dynamic chef and entrepreneur who believes in the value of whole foods and in championing the range and diversity of what is in Sabah. — LINN YONG
“I realise that our future and our survival is based on whether or not the environment can continue to produce food. So I thought, ‘It’s a very interesting time to be a chef now because these issues are pressing issues.’
“So you can be an advocate for change as well. And food is a soft skill in a way. You can preach without preaching,” she says.
To put together the food on the menu, Yong makes use of a vast network of local farmers and producers. She sources quail from a local university that runs an agriculture programme and only uses salad greens and herbs that are farmed locally. The eatery’s edible herbs meanwhile are grown by a community of female farmers in the mountains in Kundasang.
Although a significant part of her menu still features imported ingredients like Korean Hanwoo beef and Iberico pork, Yong says she has also realised that introducing more endemic Sabah ingredients require a more nuanced approach, which she does through her Local & Proud series of dishes like corn soup and laksa pesto grilled slipper lobster.
The quail that Yong used as part of a four-hands brunch with Locavore’s Ray Adriansyah, was sourced from a Sabah university’s agriculture programme.
The Garden of Eden dish meanwhile was made in collaboration with her network of female farmers and designed to raise awareness about making sustainable choices.
“In our kind of setup, I feel like there’s a very fine line between exotic and exotifying. You don’t want to use endemic ingredients just to show it exists. You want to find the right platform or the right context. On a normal day in our menu, how we do it is we basically do it in stealth mode.
We just slot it in and then if diners ask ‘What’s this?’, then we’ll explain to them. And then they become interested, rather than sprinkling it everywhere and then trying to claim to be an advocate for endemic species.
“Because to me, it’s not so much about using endemic species. It’s about how. ‘How do I do what is right, but have a wider influence beyond just the restaurant?’
Yong’s heirloom rice with lemongrass tapai, ricewine lees, octopus and shellfish is a soothing, comforting treat.
“This is why I didn’t go into fine dining. I feel like these kinds of issues and topics go down very easily when you’re in a neighbourhood industry and have regular customers. They just see it, and then they buy into it because the support for you and what you want to do is there already,” she says.
In the Malaysian culinary narrative, Sabah and Sarawak have traditionally been set aside or relinquished to a secondary role.
In the past few years though, many KL-based fine-dining restaurants have started championing native ingredients from Borneo – whether that’s latok (sea grapes), engkabang butter or heirloom rice.
While this seems like a good thing, Yong says there is a complicated thought process behind the success of these KL restaurants – and it is more than a geographical barrier.
“You cannot take what is endemic to our culture and heritage, not talk about it, and sell it as a wider Malaysia.
“I’m born in Peninsular Malaysia, but I’ve been here for 20 years. And when I talk to friends and understand what it means to be Sabahan, there’s a certain amount of injustice that they feel.
“So while I think the F&B industry players in Sabah and Sarawak should step up and have better control if they don’t want people to take away what is supposed to be their work. At the same time, I think the conversation with Peninsular Malaysian chefs should continue.
“Because a lot of the endemic products here bear a lot of weight. For a lot of people here, it is not just cultural; it is what makes them Sabahan,” she says.
