When Clifftop Group Asia decided to bring JHOL, the Michelin Guide-listed Bangkok restaurant built around India’s coastal cuisine into Kuala Lumpur, the move came with an obvious operational question: who runs the kitchen when a single-city concept suddenly has to work in a new market, under a new ownership structure, alongside outlets it has never had to support before?
The answer was Gaurav Gupta, who had spent close to a decade working alongside JHOL founder Hari Nayak, including a role helping open the original Bangkok restaurant. As Executive Chef of JHOL Kuala Lumpur, Gupta now oversees a kitchen that feeds not one dining format but three: the restaurant’s tasting and à la carte programmes, Chola, its cocktail bar, and Mintsha, a shisha lounge, all operating out of a single kitchen inside The Met, Mont Kiara.
That structure changes what the role demands day to day. “My day starts at 9 AM with a market run or supplier calls,” Gupta says of running the operation. “Then kitchen briefing, staff tastings, and of course, cooking.” Sourcing is a recurring theme in how he describes the job, JHOL KL leans on local Malaysian growers and seafood suppliers, adapted to techniques developed across India’s coastal states, which effectively means Gupta is managing two supply chains at once: one for ingredients, one for technique.
The business logic behind the expansion is straightforward. JHOL Bangkok built its reputation, a Michelin Guide listing, a mention in Asia’s 50 Best Discovery, a place among Travel & Leisure’s top Thai restaurants, on the premise that Indian cuisine could be told through the country’s coastal regions rather than a familiar handful of dishes. Kuala Lumpur gave Clifftop Group Asia a market with a fast-growing appetite for premium Indian dining, and in Gupta, kitchen leadership with the concept’s DNA already intact, a considerably easier lift than training a new executive chef from scratch in an unfamiliar culinary language.
For Gupta, the expansion also marks his first run at leading a multi-concept F&B operation rather than a single restaurant. He frames it less as a promotion than as an extension of an existing collaboration, building on systems developed at Haoma and JHOL Bangkok, where he specialised in tasting-menu execution and mentoring international kitchen brigades, and applying them to a larger, more complex property.
The next test of that system arrives this summer, when Gupta travels through Goa, Coorg, Madurai, Kerala and Kolkata on a research trip meant to feed directly into JHOL’s next seasonal menu. For a restaurant group betting on regional authenticity as its point of differentiation, that kind of ongoing menu R&D, as much operational discipline as creative process, may end up mattering to the brand’s growth as much as the Kuala Lumpur launch itself.
