Chef Fikri's and the team talk about Galanggal's cuisine and the idea behind it.
Which country inspired Galanggal's cuisine, where is it coming from?
Our foods, inspired from Eastern European and Middle Eastern Culture. It happened naturally after spending more than 10 years cooking, training and exploring flavours under many great Chefs. Apart from that, I enjoyed cooking with spices and complex flavours. It makes me decide to stick with the 2 cultures for Galanggal.
What is Galanggal cuisine characteristic?
Producing traditional European and Middle Eastern dishes requires ingredients that's not easily available in Ipoh. Importing those ingredients will increase cost which eventually need to be transferred to customers. We do not want this and because of that we looked into fusion cooking, where our dishes become imagination and improvisation from the original dishes, the blending of traditional recipes and cooking method with Ipoh local ingredients and flavour inherent to local culture.
Galanggal's Duck Confit is one of our dishes where the duck is cooked the French way, but we served it over dry lentil curry instead of mashed potatoes with a salad mixture of ulam and leaves from our owned food garden.
"It's fun to experiment with local ingredient and flavours."
At Galanggal we wanted to offer culinary adventures based on unique and distinctive tastes, we wanted to bring more colours to mainstream culinary.
What is Farm to Table?
Farm to Table is one way for us to contribute back to local society where, as a chef, it's my responsibility to promote local ingredients produce by Ipoh farmers. For us, we try to work with local producer as much as possible and we grow our owned salad mix and veggie too. At the moment, we still cannot avoid purchasing imported ingredients, especially meat like lamb shank and steak, those are imported from Australia because of the quality, nonetheless we try our best to reduce import and working with local.
What is "from local to local"?
Briefly, maximising buying from local farmers and hiring local talents so that there's more money going back into our community. We like to think that Galanggal can do more than serving good food. By supporting locals, we are helping to distribute prosperity which in a long run help to boost the circulation of our local economy. Meaning a stronger local economy and potentially happier customers.
Together with our small yet very capable and dedicated Galanggal crews, it is with great pleasure we welcome you to sample our menu.
Galanggal café is open daily from 11am to 6pm, except Friday (Closed)
Our location : 58, Lorong Cecil Rae, Jalan Lee Kwee Foh, Taman Canning, Ipoh.
Google Map: Galanggal Cafe Ipoh
See you there!