How Malaysia's wealth of produce inspires Japanese chef at K kaiseki in Kuala Lumpur
Advertisement
He was on hiatus in his homeland, Japan, when the team from Malaysian hospitality group Ilham Dining Concepts (IDC) came knocking in 2022, inviting him to start his own restaurant in Kuala Lumpur.
Seki launched his first restaurant, K, in February 2025. On the 37th floor of the Foster and Partners-designed Ilham Tower, the kaiseki restaurant offers a generous 15-course tasting menu.
Despite receiving offers from restaurants in Japan, Seki chose to move to Malaysia's capital, wanting to see more of the world while still living close to nature.
K kaiseki restaurant opened on the 37th floor of the Ilham Tower in Kuala Lumpur in March 2025. Photo: K Kuala Lumpur
'I've always wanted to gain more diverse experiences overseas and immerse myself in different cultures,' he says.
Advertisement
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
South China Morning Post
8 hours ago
- South China Morning Post
China could become a high-income country this year, but can it stay one?
There seems to be a never-ending amount of scholarship and commentary on how China can escape the middle-income trap. It moved from low-income to lower-middle-income status in 2001, then to upper-middle-income status in 2010. However, China's next transition, to high-income status and joining the ranks of the club of developed countries, is much more difficult. While the jury is still out on exactly when it might happen, it is possible that 2025 is the year China becomes a high-income country . The data points to it passing that threshold this year, but the question remains whether it will address the structural challenges that could push it back down to middle-income status. It is important to define what economists mean by the middle-income trap . According to the China 2030 Report, jointly issued by the World Bank and China in 2013, only 13 out of 101 middle-income countries (classified by gross domestic product per capita) made the transition to high-income status between 1960 and 2008. The reason so few countries have been able to make the transition is the difficulty in achieving both the structural transformation and the technological and industrial upgrading needed. As economies and wages grow, the things these economies produce must advance as well. Countries that continue to make rather simple products while their wages continue to grow put themselves in an increasingly uncompetitive position in the global economy. This makes industrial and technological upgrading a major challenge that middle-income countries must overcome. If countries wish to continue developing and avoid the middle-income trap , the structure of the economy and the institutions that govern it must transform to meet the new reality created as economies and industries mature. When economies are poor and productive forces are yet to be fully cultivated, economic growth can solve most of their problems as developing countries still have the ability to grow rapidly.
South China Morning Post
10 hours ago
- South China Morning Post
WAIC Shanghai: Tencent, SenseTime launch new AI models to stir up industry rivalry
Tencent Holdings and SenseTime launched new artificial intelligence (AI) models at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai on Sunday as Chinese Big Tech companies stepped up their rivalry in the field. Shenzhen-based social media and gaming powerhouse Tencent unveiled its Hunyuan 3D World Model 1.0, an open-source AI model capable of generating detailed three-dimensional environments, according to a statement. SenseTime, an AI pioneer in China, launched SenseNova V6.5, a new generation of its proprietary AI model series. Tencent said its latest Hunyuan model could create interactive, 360-degree virtual 3D scenes using natural language prompts or image inputs, thus significantly simplifying the production process for virtual reality experiences and video games. Tencent said Hunyuan was the industry's first open-source 3D world-generation AI fully compatible with 'CG pipelines' – the standard workflow used for creating 3D graphics and animations in film production, gaming and visual effects. An image generated by Tencent's Hunyuan3D World Model 1.0, unveiled at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on July 27, 2025. Photo: Handout Meanwhile, SenseTime claimed SenseNova V6.5 had outperformed some of its US peers such as Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro and Anthropic's Claude 4-Sonnet. Its unveiling marked the Hong Kong-listed firm's latest efforts to double down on multimodal AI models, chairman and CEO Xu Li said at the WAIC venue. The introduction followed months after it launched the previous version called SenseNova V6, a multimodal model released in April that had outperformed OpenAI's GPT-4o across several metrics.
The Standard
13 hours ago
- The Standard
Paul Chan forecasts ten-quarter rise in Hong Kong GDP
Deep Water Pavilia II has sold nearly 60 flats in the first round of sales
