QAYYUM RASHID (EXECUTIVE SOUS CHEF)

When asked when his love of cooking began, Hilton KK’s Executive Sous Chef Qayyum Rashid recalls his 9-year-old self going to his grandma’s house during the school holidays to help her sell nasi lemak, a practice his maternal family was well-known for in KL. Having not attended culinary school or completed any kind of food-related diploma, he considers his biggest teacher to have been his many travels, with his strongest influences initiating from the Middle East. He proudly and rightfully states that Malaysian chefs have an innate diversity in their skill because of the multicultural nature of their country. Indonesian, Indian, Thai are just three of the many ethnic cuisines found in East Asia. His favourite aspect and yet biggest challenge of working in the Middle East was managing people of varying cultures and mentalities. In his department alone were 132 members of staff comprising of 19 nationalities! Through those experiences, he learned to deal with different types of people, which proved valuable throughout his career.

In 2009, he met the man who would go on to become his career idol, chef Yoam Bernert in Morocco, who worked in the highest ranked hotel in the world. He speaks highly of his former mentor, who “brought [him] up, polished [him] up, trained and taught [him] life as a chef.” Their journey together influenced his attitude and character and in 2016, after seven years traveling, learning, and mastering his craft alongside chef Bernert, the two parted ways for chef Rashid to form his own path and build his own career, something he describes as both heart wrenching and necessary.

Today, with 19 years of experience under his belt, chef Rashid has brought his expertise to the Hilton KK, where he has been working as the Executive Sous Chef for eight months. He has always preferred hotels over restaurants as they do not limit chefs and instead offer them the opportunity to be more diverse in the types of dishes, they expose the clientele to: there is the hot kitchen, the cold kitchen, the butchery, the pastry section… It is also a good forum for chefs to discover where their passion lies. Not shockingly, chef Rashid states that his is everywhere. He also enjoys the hospitality and social aspect of working in a hotel, where he can form connections with clients and make them feel comfortable, an intimacy not as readily available in traditional restaurants.

His time outside of the kitchen is dedicated to reading about, tasting, or researching food, constantly updating, and perfecting his knowledge, coming up with new dish ideas, seeing what hotels from other countries are doing and how the Hilton could implement it. A truly passionate professional, which is one of the three – the other two being consistency and quality – assets he considers is most crucial for a chef to possess.

A testament to his talent, some of his best meals have been improvised, or are fusion of different original recipes. To him, being a chef is all about feeling an emotion and then having the imagination to translate it into a dish.

After all, he says it best: “Food is our soul.”