SF’s newest Malaysian restaurant Damansara to open in Noe Valley

“I came here, and I didn’t know anybody, so I had to go through this phase of trying to find and rebuild my social circle,” Goh said in a phone interview with SFGATE. “I was surprised to hear that many of them commented that I was the first Malaysian person they had ever met. And they were really curious to know about my food culture.”

Since Malaysia is a very multicultural nation, she found it hard to describe the cuisine to her new friends through words because “there is no one way to describe it.” By her estimation, it is different to different people. She then tried to take them to Malaysian restaurants in San Francisco, but again, was unsatisfied with the results she was showing her friends. 

“I realized that was like a huge lack of understanding or exposure to our nation’s food,” she said. “And the few places that I knew of in the city [in 2012], they were not exactly just Malaysian. They are all kinds of Southeast Asian [cuisine] in one.” 

This set Goh on the path to introducing as many people as possible to her version of Malaysian food. 

She started by hosting pop-up dinners in her one-bedroom apartment shortly after she immigrated to the U.S. in 2012. Even though she didn’t grow up cooking in her house as a young person, she was lucky to be exposed to a rich appreciation for food and family by her parents. Her mother, a businesswoman, was the main cook in the house. While she had a busy work schedule, she always made time to cook meals every weeknight. 

“She would always tell us that, you know, sitting around the dinner table to have at least dinner together was very important,” Goh recounted. 

Her father was also instrumental in the subtle hints that would eventually lead Goh to own a restaurant. He was perhaps a “foodie” before the term even existed. “Whenever he read a local paper or a paper mentioned some new eateries, he would drive us to go try it,” she said. “Sometimes it wasn’t even a restaurant, it was just like a food cart, like a four-hour drive from where we were. But he would take us there.”

After her successful pop-up became popular, she eventually joined La Cocina, a nonprofit incubator program in San Francisco that specializes in helping women of color build out their food business ideas. By March 2019, Goh felt she was ready to test the waters and open a brick-and-mortar. 

Three years later, Damansara, which will be located at 1781 Church St. in Noe Valley in the space that used to house Ardiana, is ready to open on Oct. 19. The menu will consist of mostly small, shareable plates. Diners can expect dishes like grilled otak-otak, spiced coconut fish cake grilled in banana leaves, and bak kwa sando, a sandwich with a house-made sweet barbecue pork jerky, sweet chili aioli and cucumber.

The signature item on the menu, though, might be the cereal fried chicken, which is made with a special cereal that Goh couldn’t actually source in America. To get the crunchy texture she was used to back in her hometown of Damansara Utama, near the capital city Kuala Lumpur, she tried something new.

“I’ve been fortunate that I can find most ingredients here in San Francisco, except for one — [a specific] cereal,” she said. “So I had to learn how to recreate something similar, but not exactly, by using what’s available here, which is puffed rice.”

Despite never dreaming of running her own restaurant, Goh is eager to share her culture with the new friends she will serve at Damansara. San Franciscans will be lucky to be able to eat at one of the few purely Malaysian food restaurants in the city.