The restaurant is located in a neighbourhood shophouse in a Damansara Heights teachers’ estate (All photos: Michelle Lin)
Malaysians have never really taken to French haute cuisine. By which I mean pure French, not to be confused with the way it is cooked by the Japanese, or with native ingredients such as Thai or whatever the flavour of the month happens to be. Sure, brasseries and bistros abound at lower price points, but I cannot think of a proper French fine dining restaurant that Kuala Lumpur has taken to heart since Lafite at the Shangri-La closed. Even Lafite had its horrific midlife crisis, pathetically dabbling in molecular gastronomy to regain its relevance to the rakyat before trying, and failing, to get back on track.
What I take from this is that apart from our classic street foods, our dining scene is incredibly fickle, insecure and trend-driven. Classic French food is anything but trendy, yet I hate that things like flavour, texture, great ingredients and great sauces (you know, the basic building blocks of a good meal) could ever go out of fashion.
So, I cannot explain why Darren Teoh, founder-chef of the very trendy, zeitgeist-y, 50 Best-thirst-trappy, cutting-edge, pioneering native locavorist two Michelin-starred Dewakan, has gone off-piste by opening Bidou, a restaurant devoted to the pleasures of French fine dining, in KL.
If you ask him, he will say French cuisine is his first love. He is, after all, a classically trained cook who left our shores to pursue the craft at a higher level. And we got an inkling of this back in Restaurant Week 2023 when Dewakan featured a limited-time menu with classics from the grand French chefs.
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Bidou, French for “belly”, has coasted under the radar since a soft opening in March. It is still, I believe, officially in soft-opening mode pending getting its alcohol licence. It is not exactly standing on a soapbox and proclaiming it is open for business. Its website is just a homepage with contact details and a quote from Hemingway, while its Instagram is a bunch of candid pics of the kind favoured by younger millennials and cryptic captions all in French.
Located in a neighbourhood shophouse in a Damansara Heights teachers’ estate, it is startling to see gentrification of this degree taking over shoplots once occupied by bicycle shops and local-style bakeries. Teoh and his investors have done a great job in respecting the old structure but creating a beautiful space within, all finished in blushing peach. It is casual enough but suggests a hint of luxury. I would go so far as to call it soothing and calming, except for the bad acoustics from all the hard surfaces.
But what about the food? Not happy with just cooking French, Teoh has attached to his dishes the names of the great chefs who inspired them: Michel Guérard, Paul Bocuse, Roger Vergé, Daniel Calvert and even les deux plus grandes fromages Fernand Point and Auguste Escoffier. I am not sure Calvert, of the three-starred Sézanne in Tokyo, belongs in that pantheon, but he is clearly popular enough to inspire a new KL restaurant cynically named “Cézanne”. Tant pis.
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I love the menu structure, a formule where you choose one course each from the cold starters, hot starters, main course and dessert. Three to five choices are offered for each course — compact, streamlined and snappy. There is nothing on the menu that I do not want to try.
I am happy to report that Bidou’s food is better than good. It is very good, bordering on great, and I have eaten at the tables of most of the chefs named on the Bidou menu. The Salade Gourmande, attributed to Guérard, features a mix of Cameron Highlands vegetables, which are fine on their own, but outperform stratospherically when paired with the most insanely yummy foie gras terrine I have had in the Eastern Hemisphere: buttery, creamy, liver-y, savoury, complex. There is an old maxim that if you take an animal’s life, you must respect it by making the most of its body. This maximally luscious foie gras is, for me, the apotheosis of that belief.
The techniques are spot on. A beautiful consommé is clean-tasting, sweet and pure, and pairs deliciously with parcels of marinated raw prawn (it sounds better if I call them crevettes crues marinées). The pastry work for the loup de mer en croute (seabass in puff pastry stuffed with a scallop mousse), made iconic by Paul Bocuse, is sublime: gorgeously browned, crispy and tender, and creating a wonderful textural counterpoint to the meaty fish encased within.
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I should note that Teoh is not trying to do his best imitation of the classics. The sea bass at Bocuse, for example, is a whole fish stuffed with scallop mousse and is best shared between three persons. The last time I had it, we shared it between two and managed to make a dinner out of the leftover pastry — that is how rich and indulgent it was. Teoh has moved the emphasis away from the scallop mousse to the fish, which he perfumed with various herbs. Correctly in my view, he also downsized it for individual servings appropriate to our climate and physiology, that is, Malaysians generally being smaller than the Europeans and Americans who populate these three-star palaces.
But did he downsize them too much? It must be said that the portions are modest, perhaps too modest if you fancy yourself a gourmand in the truest sense of the word. Four courses here will set you back RM377++, which is fair for the quality, but we all know Malaysians treasure quantity just as much. Bidou may well be the litmus test of this, and how much we have outgrown the old stereotypes (if at all).
I hope Bidou succeeds, I really do. It is boldly going where no man has gone before, while trying to live long and prosper, not a given in the current depressed state of F&B. Compared to the last iteration of Lafite under Olivier Pistre, Bidou’s flavours are bolder and the produce of better quality. Pistre was a very good cook, but he struggled with supply-chain constraints, and Teoh gives nothing up to Pistre on a technical level. Bidou is, for me, a jewel that deserves to be better known and better appreciated.
It is hard to believe we are only halfway through what has been a very exciting 2025 for the restaurant scene. Bidou is helping to drive that continuing momentum in a big way.
Score: 15.25 /20
Food: 7.75/10
Service: 3.75/5
Ambience: 2/3
Magic: 1.5/2
Bidou, 9, Jalan Setiakasih 5, Bukit Damansara, KL. Wed-Sun, 6-10.30pm. For reservations, call 012 278 6720.
This article first appeared on June 16, 2025 in The Edge Malaysia.
