Nikolaj Lenz, Chef & Partner at Canvass KL

Nikolaj Lenz

In this interview, Nikolaj Lenz shares his perspective on cheffing as a career and where he and his restaurant Canvass are headed.

What do you do and how did you get into the industry?

I have been a cook and chef over the last 25 years. From a lowly but ambitious line-cook full of spit and fury to a hotel chef and then corporate chef. Now I am full-circling it back to being a hands-on chef and partner of Canvass Kuala Lumpur.

Honestly, I don’t really know how I got into the hospitality industry. I was supposed to have been a psychologist. Decades ago I made a captivating friend who was a chef, who convinced me to start part time with him in his kitchen. You know, to make an extra income and perhaps flirt with the waitresses. I mean, which twentysomething young man won’t agree to the above?

Growing up in a welfare country like Denmark, it was not considered a major family trauma, that I changed over to the restaurant side. Since it was implied that, I obviously would return to the path of psychology after a couple of years.

Back then, in the 1990s Denmark, the average career as a cook was six years. Before cooks had second thoughts and found other more work-life balanced careers. However, I found much to my surprise, that I was talented at cooking and that my passion fit perfectly with the hectic non-compromising life in the kitchens.

I soon ended up travelling the world and cooked in all sorts of venues – many of high repute with fancy accolades. Some in my family, had expressed that if I did indeed cook, then I should at least do so at the best places possible. So, I tagged some of those too.

Share with us an interesting story from behind the scenes.

It’s fair to say we chefs start out full of energy and passion. Wielding knives, dreams and fragile egos, as we aim to lift our weight in the kitchens that will have us. Copenhagen, in the ’90’ies had grown into a bit of a scene with the first generation of hardcore and famous younger chefs taking over cafe’s and bistros. Turning them into fast paced ambitious casual dining oyster grasping and champagne gulping yuppie spots. Hardcore kitchens serving massive volumes of good food very fast, followed by intense partying after service. For chefs and guests alike.

I was overseas cooking then, so I missed a lot of that. Yet at the tail end of that period, I returned after some time in Italy. I got to work in a small quiet and intimate restaurant run by one of these still quite infamous and hardline chefs. This chef had built his fame on his extreme need for quality, extensive verbal abuse and hectic drug use.

What to do? I needed work, so I went to help him run his small 25 seat place. It was just him, his fiancée as waitress and a dishwasher from Morocco. Every day I waited for him to go bat shit crazy, but the worst he did was get close to me as I cooked, exactly what he told me to, muttering, “I hate it when you do exactly as I say… Give me something to yell about…!” He mostly smiled when he muttered this. Not always. But I took it as a compliment. He had mellowed out and gotten softer, but never wavered an inch on his need for quality. And he still wanted the rush of telling people off.

It is often addictive to a chef, to be right and tell people they are wrong. It’s a true self-fueling rush. But he was the first chef I met, who had turned his mad passion into a more mellow and wise energy. If he hadn’t, his fiancée said one night, he would not have survived beyond those 90’s.

What’s a food memory from your childhood or travels that stands out?

This was when I was an unpaid line-cook in one of the starred food temples I worked in during the times I was in Italy. We, the un-salaried cooks that worked just for the experience, often shared ideas and recipes over coffee breaks sitting on old wine boxes in the alleys or receiving areas. One day, long before Heston Blumenthal or Massimo Bottura became known to the wider world, I remember we cooks had discussed a bit of a mad pairing of white chocolate with fresh dill.

Many of the cooks dismissed this and in typical Italian style waved their hands dismissively as they finished their espresso’s and got back to work. But the idea lingered. Some years later as a chef in charge, I finally managed to serve a pre-dessert to a wedding group made out of the white chocolate, dill and sweet pickled fennel.

As the 200 plates left the kitchen, I had a moment to remember the time I sat behind that restaurant drinking coffee and sharing ideas. Sometimes we reflect back on moments of idea inception. For me always fondly. That pairing worked that day. Perhaps we can do it even better in the future.

What’s the best/ worst part of your job?

I don’t have a job; I have a passion. That is the best and worst part in one. The relentless self-questioning but also self-motivating perspective of passion. Passion gets you up in the morning with a specific drive and energy, but the same passion also beats you over the head at night if the day didn’t go as well as it possibly could. It can be rough. Passion does get wiser, if you let it. I have now experienced that. So. you might say, it becomes a good but still strict companion.

It disallows any human urge to aim for the path of least resistance. It calls your bluff at any attempts to lower your sense of quality should you feel tired or try to “sell out”.

If you do sell out, it comes with a heavy cost of distorted self-perception. Ending up with an error code that says, “404 old self not found.” It huffs and puffs at terms such as “KPI’s” and “quarterly targets” and other corporate related terms of endearment. It dismisses the notion, that what I do is in anyway a classifiable as such a thing as a “job.” I actually think that is one of the best things about my “job” – that I don’t have one.

Nikolaj Lenz’s favourite food and beverage pairing?

Today?

I don’t believe I’m able to have any one favourite for longer than 90 minutes. I don’t have a favourite food, nor a favourite drink, right now…

I do have preferred urges and cravings that appear at different times. Some of these are powerful enough to motivate me to go far (or near) to have those sensory needs fulfilled.

I can recollect the favourite states of mind I had regarding food. Moments of taste related happiness, contentedness, mixed with a sense of fulfilled adventure to have achieved that moment. But not one taste need or moment in particular.

I suspect that many chefs olfactory reward moments are not “monogamous”. The taste and sense experience of chefs are so attuned to multitudes, that our so called favourites take turns to appear.

I do remember an awesome one-dollar whiskey sour at a roadside bar in Phnom Penh, with a good old friend. Made by a local, surprisingly young and boyish bartender, who told us he was adopted by some Swiss people who helped him study bartending.

Adventure, excitement and a subsequent successful fulfillment moment are certainly the required ingredients for any of my favourite pairings. A dash or pinch of surprise helps too.

What’s one of the craziest things you’ve seen behind the scenes?

When fishermen go and catch a fish. It tends to grow in size each time they share the story of their catch. I believe chef’s stories are the same. I really never saw anything out of the ordinary. I swear.

Just remember that almost anything you can imagine becomes ordinary behind the scenes of a restaurant or hotel. Perfectly normal days galore.

I did have to sign an NDA once.

The perfect day off would be…

14 of them in a row.

A day in the life of a Nikolaj Lenz is…

Peaceful, routine and short. Then I wake up.

What do you do for fun?

Laugh…

What’s something you’d like guests to know about Canvass?

Beyond a real risk of sounding like a tried and tested cliche, we have opened a place that we would like to go to ourselves. We have decided to pursue, continuously and expandingly, a path for our restaurant to be focused on how sustainable, recycling and even upcycling we can become.

How to reduce food waste. How to create menus where we upcycle food ingredients, for instance by fermentation, to allow us to use a wider part of our food ingredients to create more delicious flavours. Mostly comfort food flavours.

We are constantly working on ways to avoid using single-use plastic mindlessly, and use natural chemical free soaps and detergents made locally here in Malaysia.

Recycle our cooking oils to bio-fuel. Learning how to create and maintain a composting space for our expanding outside garden, where we will avoid fertilisers and all things needlessly chemical.

We are ticking of boxes from our list on things we need to do better. While we develop our restaurant into a community as an aware, responsible and balanced place.

In our menus we are building a hedonic balance we call, sustainable hedonism. It means that we work with all sorts of healthy and planet-friendly ingredients as our functional base and then we add some hedonism and to some extent splurging ingredients on top. We use goji berries as a popular example, but we will also add pure unadulterated butter to our chocolate cake coz we feel we need to.

There will be a balance at Canvass, always skewed towards the sustainable and long term. Not dish by dish but by menus.

What’s something you’d like people to know about being a chef as a profession?

Erm…. From mindless passionate cooking with my eyes fixed on accolades and ego motivated desires. I would say that cooking now, today, in these times more than ever comes with a deeper price and a more profound reward.

If you approach this industry right. If you put yourself in the right perspective to this industry, I would claim it’s easy to see that it now comes with a great responsibility to your larger community first. It is no longer “just” about creating great fancy Instagrammable food. Those days are over. I mean it. Don’t do this for ego driven stardom, do it for purpose!

Join us only if you sense this deeper purpose of serving food to your community, and you can think of nowhere else to be, or anything else you want to do. And for everyone else, please support your local chefs and operators. The food scene in your city is important both historically, culturally and socially now and in the future.

What’s your view on the food/drink scene in KL?

To be honest, my view is changing. I have seen the development in KL over the last 15 years plus. At first, I saw KL as the little “odd cousin of Singapore” where people would go down to Singapore and eat more imaginatively. KL is growing up. I almost dare say, it is maturing. Almost… pre-COVID I saw more and more Singaporeans come up here instead of staying down there.

As a chef having lived years in a bustling food city like Bangkok, I found KL to be a bit small. A bit backwards and frankly quite repetitive. I didn’t see the passion needed to change the industry. Passion for revenue yes, but passion for uniqueness not so much. Only in glimmers here and there. Good local cooks would go to Singapore and even further away. But now I see signs that they are back again. There is, however, still a way to go to a situation where skilled and passionate staff are more abundant.

However, it is also on us, operators to help make this industry one that is attractive both in terms of work-life balance and in terms of salary opportunities, personal growth and so on. It’s great personally to see a growing focus on local food. Local produce. And a move into serving more creative dishes without being super fine dining about it. It’s also fun to see local fine dining still battling it out, with their eyes set on their peers in neighbouring countries.

It gives me hope that we can all help push the boundaries of the culinary scene here. We need the mainstream suppliers to understand the value of unique produce and products with a planet-friendly history. Not merely focus on volume imports of big agriculture products. Smaller local suppliers are already growing in awareness. And we see signs that things are changing. I’d love for it to be faster in pace though.

When we, as a community, including all our guests, demand a focus on better quality and local quality, we will quickly see the effect of a strong aware food-scape in Malaysia.

What’s in store for Nikolaj Lenz and Canvass in the upcoming months?

Cooking. Testing, Serving and meeting people. Developing our menus and training our team. Tying up with more farmers to play with recipes that use recognised and mainstream ingredients in new and classic ways. As well as using more irregular ingredients in regular ways where we can.

In terms that our stakeholders understand, we will simply grow our menus (brand promise) and create foods and beverages that we ourselves love to enjoy.

So far it seems to be the case, that what we love, quite a lot of people are beginning to love too. So, we will up our game then. Increase the love.

Oh, and we are working on an intimate Canvass private dining venue with an open kitchen. And before I forget, also working on a Danish-inspired bakery too!

All sustainable and hedonistic.

Find more interviews similar to this one with chef Nikolaj Lenz here. And, stay up to date with the latest food and beverage happenings in KL here.