The Eater Award–winning Hainan Chicken House in Sunset Park opened in 2023 with a lesser-seen Malaysian-style Hainan chicken served with sticky rice balls, plus rotating specials that stayed fresh even for regulars. Owner Chris Low says he hadn’t planned to be “mega-involved,” but once he found himself there far more than expected, “we owed it to ourselves to try something that’s fully fleshed out that isn’t just a happy accident.”
That’s the momentum behind Kelang, the family’s follow-up restaurant that opened in Greenpoint, at 715 Manhattan Avenue, near Norman Avenue, in early December. “It’s everything that I wanted to be able to do at Chicken House,” he tells Eater.
Through Kelang, Low is pulling from various facets of his identity: his family’s lineage in Malaysia’s port city of Klang, his parents’ Chinese Malaysian roots, and his upbringing in Brooklyn in the 1980s and 1990s…