At Brooklyn Malaysian restaurant, every dish comes wrapped as a gift

At Hainan Chicken House in Sunset Park, the signature dish is special to the Low family.

"This is a family-owned restaurant and five of my family members are involved in this. So it's my aunt, my mother, my father, my sister and myself," said Chris Low, the owner.

He said that he grew up eating it with his grandparents in Malaysia.

"When you get the actual plate, it's the chicken, the chicken rice, a trio of sauces which is dark soy, a kalamansi chili garlic lime, chili sauce, and a ginger scallion sauce," Low said.

They plate their rice dishes the way they do in Southeast Asia.

"You'll find that in Thailand and Malaysia, it's really common when you order to go, the dish will come wrapped up in newspaper or butcher paper. So, we really wanted to emulate that here. Super nostalgic for us. And everybody likes getting presents. So, when you get the dish, it comes as a little gift package on the table, you get to open it up. I don't know...it's just the experience of it is, I think is really nice," Low said.

He has some recommendations.

"The sort of top three dishes I'd recommend coming here probably be like a two-meat combo. So you can either get the Hainanese chicken and roast chicken and the char siu pork belly which is kind of like a BBQ Roast pork belly," Low said. "There's a soup called Bak kut teh which is sort of like an herbal, pork bone stew."

Low says that it is almost like a medicinal beef stew.

"There's a lot of roots in there, herbs, mushrooms, soy, it's very umami and it's a specialty from where my family is from in Malasia, which is Klang," he said.

Low is glad that he and his family can expose New Yorkers to Malaysian cuisine and culture.

"Being able to introduce people to Malaysian cuisine who aren't familiar with it has been a lot of fun. Like I think that was one of the goals of opening the restaurant. And that people might not have that much exposure to Malaysian cuisine, and I was hoping that by coming here...we'd be able to sort of walk them through it," he said.

They approach everything from a really genuine place.

"So, anything that we do here is because we like it that way, it's our preference, and we sort of just want to share that with people. And I think that's what people take away when they come here," Low said.