 Like, I know so many, you know, chefs that they have like a secret recipe that they don't share, you know? Yeah. To me, that's just holding yourself back, you know? The moment you stop and you say, like, what's made me successful is this one dish. That's when you stop growing yourself. Hawker markets are one of the must visits when you're in Southeast Asia. Just imagine all your local favorite foods, all housed under one giant roof. Today, I'm going to be bringing you behind the scenes to potluck hawker eatery, where we get to see how Dom and Justin was able to bring this unique concept into North America. Let's go behind the scenes and check out the secret sauce behind their successful launch. Potluck hawker eatery is located on Canby Street in Vancouver, an area known for many smaller boutique shops and restaurants lining the busy street. They open Wednesday through Sunday for lunch from 11.30 a.m. to 2.30 p.m., and dinner from 5 p.m. to 8.30 p.m., giving their customers lots of opportunity to grab some delicious hawker-style eats. Food that's ideal for a quick bite for lunch, ordering for takeout, or sharing amongst family and friends. Hello. Hello. Thanks for having me here today. Yeah, thanks Wilson. Like, I'm really, really excited to be here because hawker's market food is one of my favorites. Can you actually tell us a little bit more about the concept behind a hawker's market? Yeah, absolutely. The whole idea of hawker's and the idea of potluck is to bring together all the different Southeast Asian flavors together. And that's kind of like what you want to be able to do because like a hawker's market is huge with so many different stalls and now you're just putting everything under one roof. Essentially, yes. At the same time, we try to keep the menu limited and small so that we can keep rotating and exploring and changing the menu as we go. Something that I really like about your food is that you keep the authentic style and technique of cooking but then yet you also have this modern twist to it. Like even just looking at your decor and your aesthetics is like, wow, this is so fresh. It's not like the typical really grungy kind of look. It's like, wow, it's fresh. It looks vibrant. Which is good too. But yeah, we definitely want customers to come in and feel comfortable and so that way is the best way we can introduce people to our food. Perfect. Actually, speaking of your food, you want to show me? Yeah, absolutely. Cool. Yeah, let's go. On the menu, Justin combines Malaysian, Thai and Filipino flavors into a symphony of South Asian cuisine all wrapped up in hawker street food style dishes that really fit the vibrancy of the flavors that they offer. And when it comes to prices, potluck also offers a ton of value with an average ticket cost of only $15. No wonder this place has exploded onto the scene since its opening in April of 2020. You know this is like Instagram famous. It's mind-blowing how many times this shows up on my feed. We always knew that Egg Yolk is very undermined in the local community, right? Because it is common in Asian community, but local people do not really know what this sauce is exactly, right? It's only available in Chinese restaurants, right? So we want to have that. So that was our stock, right? And to balance that, we put in like chili jam to give it a little bit of a spice. And our green mango to cut the grease a little bit with the sourness. So do I get to make my own? If you want, I got two ready. You can make one, and I can make one. Beautiful. You can follow me. Beautiful. Let's do that. So we got one brush. We call it like the Picasso brush. Picasso brush. Yeah, yeah, it is a brush. We just coat it generously on a brad so that it kind of like evenly toasted around. So I just kind of like rub it around so that it's evenly coated. Yeah, exactly. So this is your famous egg yolk sauce. Yeah, with the butter and the egg yolk sauce. The saltiness, buttery, creamy flavor comes from the egg yolk sauce, right? And then the chili jam kind of gives a spice from a chili. And the slaw gives the sourness, the grease cut into it, right? Oh, sorry, I even painted yours. It's okay, I'm going to dose mine with more. I'm going to do this one. Yes. I'm going to do this side. Thank you. I'm going to dose mine with extra egg yolk sauce. So where did you meet? Justin, okay. So I'm more like a business person, right? But I always love cooking. So when I first moved to Vancouver, I looked for a kitchen cook job. And my first job, Justin called me the next day, and I worked for him for over a year. And then I stopped and I went back to my country to do my restaurants and stuff. And then when I came back, yeah, we just like decided to start this. That's really cool. Like you used to work for him and now you guys are partners. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Great stuff, yeah. So now you got that one. So we do a little bit of a scoop of a chili jam, right? Like this. And just kind of like draw it in, yeah. Oh, is it really spicy? It looks really spicy. It's not, right? That's why everybody can eat, right? Yeah, if you were to put actual, that's why we call it chili jam, right? Like if you were to put like chili sauce or the chili paste, it's totally different, right? So we make it a little sweeter on that one, right? Okay, so now we stop it in there, we do a five. Wow. See, I toasted a little longer, so the bread holds. When you toasted a little bit like less, the bread would be a little softer. Right. Oh, okay, now I get it, wow. Exactly, right? That's a little different, right? That's the secret sauce. That's a difference. So now we put our slaw, yeah? Yeah. So just kind of like, I take a little pinch, but not too overwhelming the other components inside. Then we put our cereal, which has curry leaf inside as well. Gotcha, gotcha. Is this a cereal? Cereal. Cereal, a little bit of fried shallots. And then we put in, of course, the batter, and then we toast the cereal with the batter. Yeah, ooh, I love this. Some milk powder. Yeah, yeah, beautiful, and this is good to go. Voila, done. Wow, can I eat this? Yes, I want to have a bite right now. I made my own sandwich. Oh, good, thank you. Thank you, problem, not a problem. Thank you for helping out with another sandal. Now the space that Justin and Dominic have created is truly one of a kind. Successfully transferring the vibrancy and fun of the food that they offer into the surrounding area, from the colorful wallpaper in the restaurant and washrooms to the iconic ingredients put on display. Potluck hawker eateries certainly has a fun, nostalgic vibe for those choosing to dine in. It really is inspiring to see a restaurant like this open during such hard times and see them receive so much support from the local community. Tell me, tell me more about potluck hawkers. I think when you guys first started, actually just opened during COVID. Yes, yeah, so I did the typical training, the classic training. I worked in a lot of bistros and Italian food and at one point in my life, I kind of got burnt out of that and I kind of thought about what kind of made me happy and what kind of food made me happy, you know, and that's when I wanted to discover a little bit more about my roots, Malaysia and Singapore and stuff like that. Has opening a restaurant been one of your dreams or you just kind of enjoy it and everything kind of just... Yeah, you know, to be honest, I think a lot of chefs, you know, like their dream is always to open their own restaurant and for me, I can't say I've ever had that dream, you know, and I've cooked for a long time and explored a lot of different types of cuisine and kept learning as much as I could and at some point I figured out that I didn't really want to learn anything else except for the food I'm doing. So that's when I thought it would be a good idea to explore a little bit more about Malaysia and give something back to the community and I think with my experience with opening Long Tail and other restaurants, I kind of had that in the back of my brain so it kind of came together, yeah, exactly and I started to get more excited about it but definitely it wasn't something that, you know, since I was a kid or since I started cooking, I was like, oh, I want to have my own place with it. So that passion just kind of grew on you, you're like, wow, and then now you just want to have your own creative outlet to actually bring that cuisine. Yeah, and I thought it was just, it's not, I think at this point in my life, it's not even all about the cooking, of course it's great to showcase something creative and your own story and stuff like that but it really is about giving back to the industry as well and when we hire cooks and sous chefs and stuff like that to give them the opportunity to grow and learn something different and I hope as well that they'll be just as successful. Right, so like it's, you had that idea, you know what, you had the experience that you've been in the industry long enough and now you're like, you know what, let's open up a restaurant and you told me a little bit about the story, the crazy story of you coming in here super angry, yeah, you know, I was like, yo, Justin, tell me the story when you're about to cry and you're like, yes, when I first walked into this place, I'm about to cry. I was so excited, you know, I think it's just emotional roller coaster, right? And this is of course before COVID even dropped on us and, you know, we just put a lot of money into this place and we didn't really know what we're getting into and, you know, I knew we're going to do a lot of renovations and make the restaurant all pretty and everything but, you know, we've been cooking all our lives, cleaning all our lives and when I came into this restaurant, it came from like almost like an owner that really didn't care, right? And the condition of the restaurant was just like, I've never seen anything like it before, just like trash everywhere. It was like, he just walked out of service midway and like huge stock pots of stock on the burner and stuff like just moldy in the fridge and it was just disgusting. And so then the whole process was super difficult for you guys because like it's really scary because after you guys took over and you're like, you had all these big dreams, you're like, you know what, we're going to merge the culture and make something good, give back to the community and all of a sudden COVID hits. Yeah, I mean it really made us rethink the whole process and how we're going to tackle it. I guess we took possession in February, it was mid-March when COVID broke out here in Vancouver and when that hit, we were probably about 65 percent complete, right? So it's not like we could take anything back and oh, let's not do the floors, let's not paint this or whatever. We were already like more than halfway through it. So there was really no option but to complete it, right? That's crazy. So after you guys, you know what, let's open the doors, let's hope for the best, let's hope someone comes and then you open the doors and it's like line up out the doors every single day. Yeah. Like how, what was that secret sauce? What was the thing that made it work for you guys? I think our timing, like I said, you know, during COVID, like it just seemed, it seemed like a really bad time but I think we're blessed when the time we're actually ready to open was when people are ready to dine in and people are looking for something fresh and exciting. So just, it was well received and even leading up to it, you know, we're still, you know, finishing little details a couple of weeks before but we had so many people come in and say they're in the neighborhood and they're so excited to come here, right? So we just try to be ourselves, you know, and that's what is. We try to keep a small menu. I know some people expect something larger and some people might compare us to other Malaysian restaurants like Banana Leaf and so forth that have an extensive menu but what we try to do is the same idea of the name Potluck. It's really coming together of different Southeast Asian cuisines and it's not just focused on Malaysian. It's inspired by my mom's cooking but I mean, I have cooks from the Philippines, from Burma and Vietnam and all sorts of places so it's really bringing all those flavors together and keeping everything fresh. Like we keep a short menu, we change it frequently. We're not afraid to take something that's popular off the menu so we can put something else on, right? And there's always going to be demand for certain items to stay but we keep continually trying to push ourselves. Currently we have a different menu from lunch and dinner and we hope to as well have a brunch menu on the weekends. So we don't want to be like a typical restaurant. We want to push ourselves to be like the best restaurants in the city. Right, just be innovative, combine everything together, bring the best from all these different cultures and bring it back here. How does that creative process come about? Like, you know what chasing fads are difficult? Yeah, I just get inspired by them. I see what everyone else is doing and I was like, we can make something with our own style and you know with a Malaysian twist or whatever, right? Yeah, that's part of what we really enjoy and that's why I try to teach all the cooks as well to also have input on the menu as well because that's how we all grow together, right? Like I know so many chefs that they have like a secret recipe that they don't share, you know? To me that's just holding yourself back, you know? The moment you stop and you say like what's made me successful is this one dish, that's when you stop growing yourself. Ah, so always innovating. You know what, not a lot of people can actually keep innovating. You know, it's tiring. It's a lot of work, it's a lot of R&D and it's a lot of money and time spent on it and you're already cooking every single day with your dish and you're still innovating. So, definitely shines through for your food and thank you. Thank you so much for sharing that secret with us. Yeah, I mean if anything, sometimes you know the challenge is actually holding back because really, you know, as you can see, like, you know, we have a small kitchen, small restaurant, very little fridge space, very little freezer space. So, in some ways that's to our advantage because we got to keep things fresh. We got to prep day by day and whatever we use we sell out, right? Right. Something that I really appreciate about you guys is your aesthetics, your design and it's just the whole flow. Like I was just on, I just saw Dom, he came out and he was grabbing like noodles. Is this part of the concept or is just your smart way of? Yeah, I mean part of the vibrancy of our style, food is really the branding and, you know, all these little bottles and they're so colorful and they're naturally part of the design, right? But naturally, they're part of what we use day in, day out, right? So, for people to see that and a lot of it could be nostalgic moments for people, you know? Like, oh, like I used to use this at home and stuff like that. That's exactly what we were talking about too. You can never have a shortage of storage space, right? Yes, yes. So for us to be able to utilize the wall and the pony wall and stuff like that and still showcase it to customers is great. And I think at some point, you know, we can have some products for sale as well so that people can try to make the food at home themselves. And maybe in our own chili oil and sambal and stuff like that as well. It's so crazy how not only are you so focused on your food, but also the aesthetics, the design, and actually understanding the whole concept and tying everything together. It's definitely like all these years of working in the industry definitely paid off for you and did an amazing job. So tell me more about your plans, plans for Palak. Yeah, I mean, we'll kind of just write it out and see where it goes. It's an interesting time. You know, I've had people ask me, you know, is it a good time to open a restaurant? Is there a market for that? And I think, you know, with our concept, being casual and affordable and fresh, definitely I think there's, you know, there's a market for that for sure. So we'll see where it goes. You know, definitely I have a lot of different ideas, you know, for the future and maybe even smaller concepts. Yes, yes. But it's got to work with the market. It's got to work with, you know, what's going on today. Thank you. Thank you so much for this. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate this. Take care. You too. So there you go, friends. The secret sauce behind Potluck's successful launch. Justin's philosophy is simple. Take the leap and chase your dreams and always innovate to come up with fresh new ideas. Thank you so much for watching this episode of The Secret Sauce. I'll see you guys in the next episode.