Local ingredients and culinary talents take center stage during a flavor-packed weekend food festival in Kota Kinabalu.

Photographs by Christopher P. Hill

*Left to right:* Chef Linn Yong at Limau & Linen; prawns on brioche at the same restaurant.

When I landed in Kota Kinabalu on a Friday afternoon in early November, I had one thing on my mind: food. This might sound surprising for a town best known as a jumping-off point for the offshore islands of Tunku Abdul Rahman National Park or more adventurous excursions into the Borneo hinterland, but my weekend visit coincided with the local debut of the Kita Food Festival, which promised—and delivered—an intriguing culinary lineup.

The capital of the East Malaysian state of Sabah, Kota Kinabalu overlooks the South China Sea from its position on the northwestern coast of Borneo. Though it doesn’t have much in the way of historic architecture—most colonial-era buildings here were razed by Allied bombers during the Japanese occupation of British Borneo in World War II—the city of half a million does have a certain workaday charm, not to mention its own gastronomic appeal.

Seafood, as you might expect, is a main draw, but so too are regional specialties like sang nyuk mee (pork noodles) and nasi linopot (seasoned rice wrapped in banana leaf). Yet there’s also the stirrings of a more refined Sabahan dining scene, led by forward-thinking chefs like Linn Yong and Raphael Peter Lee. That, plus the eager participation of the Sabah Tourism Board and hotels like the two-year-old Hyatt Centric Kota Kinabalu, made Kota Kinabalu a natural choice for the latest edition of the Kita Food Festival.

An annual series of events celebrating food in Southeast Asia, the festival was launched in 2021 by Penang-based former travel writer Leisa Tyler and chef Darren Teoh of Kuala Lumpur’s two-Michelin-starred Dewakan. Since then, it has expanded to Singapore and other Malaysian locales. The idea, says Tyler, who owns and runs a sustainable farming project in the Cameron Highlands, is to “foster meaningful connections between chefs, producers, and food enthusiasts, while elevating the local culinary scene and showcasing it to the world.”

*Left to right:* Guest chef Aidan Low prepping the kitchen team at Oitom; Kota Kinabalu’s Signal Hill.

Besides chef pair-ups and a big barbecue session, the festival also includes a series of talks—dubbed Kita Conversations—by food experts on salient topics such as sustainability and food waste. Beyond that, it supports a mentorship program designed to inspire Malaysia’s next generation of culinary talent through skill-building masterclasses and visits to organic farms.

The festival’s Kota Kinabalu program kicked off with a cocktail soiree at the Hyatt Centric, a sleek, Kengo Kuma–designed tower set back from the waterfront on the city’s main drag. The venue was the hotel’s ON23 Sky Bar, whose aerie-like perch affords views across a narrow channel to the stilt villages that gird the eastward arm of Gaya Island. Behind the bar, a trio of locally based mixologists crafted zingy concoctions like the Lihing Sour, made with a type of Sabahan rice wine.

Local flavors infused lunch the next day as well. Hosted by Linn Yong’s buzzy bistro-style restaurant Limau & Linen, the affair saw Yong, a self-taught chef from Kuala Lumpur who moved to Sabah two decades ago with her Sandakan- born husband, joined by Indonesian chef Ray Adriansyah, renowned for his progressive, hyperlocal cuisine at Bali’s Locavore NXT. I lost track of who was behind each of the lunch’s six savory courses, but the collaboration was well orchestrated. Dishes included Two Offals—supremely tender beef tongue and braised tendon served with roasted watermelon, kimchi juice, and chimichurri—and quail gleaming with a glaze of rosella wine and marrow accompanied by a rose-and-tuhau (wild ginger) marmalade. An uncontested hit was Yong’s Tajau Heirloom Rice. Combined with dried octopus and shellfish, the rice—an endemic red varietal called rongguol, sourced from farms of the Kadazan-Dusun ethnic community—was cooked in miniature clay tajau pots that the chef placed on the table one at a time, before breaking open the pastry crust and pouring in rice wine lees. This was comfort food of the highest order.

The celebration of native ingredients and food ways resumed that night at Oitom, the fine-diner of Raphael Peter Lee. Belying its location in a mammoth apartment complex, this was an intimate space, with a handful of tables framing an open kitchen station where a dozen or so cooks were busy prepping and plating for the first of the evening’s sold-out seatings. Lee, whose heritage is part Chinese, part Kadazan-Dusun, has been on a mission to elevate Sabah’s native ingredients since he opened Oitom in 2019; this night, he had teamed up with chef Aidan Low of Kuala Lumpur’s Akâr Dining to present a wine-paired 10-course tasting menu that unfolded languidly over two hours. Standouts included delicate beetroot pie tee pastries filled with ex-dairy beef tartare and Malaysian sturgeon caviar, freshly filleted grouper swimming in a tomato and XO emulsion, and Low’s remarkable oyster ice cream, served in a chilled chayote gourd with sea grapes and fermented sambal.

*Left to right:* The Murug-Turug waterfall; Wrasse cured in calamansi salt with a side of pickled wild mango, served at a lunch along the Kiulu River.

Thankfully, there was a chance to work some of this off the next morning on a foraging excursion with a group of chefs and media. An hour’s drive brought us into the hills below the rocky, sawtooth peaks of Mount Kinabalu, Borneo’s highest mountain. We followed a forest trail down into a valley, passing rice terraces and farm plots. As we walked, the chefs gathered edible leaves and fronds from wayside: midin (bracken ferns), pandan, and what Linn Yong described as the “holy trinity” of Sabahan cooking: losun (wild spring onions), bunga kantan (torch ginger), and the aforementioned tuhau.

After cooling our feet in the pool of a waterfall, it was time to hike back up to cars for the drive to a campsite along the Kiulu River, where Yong and chef Adrian Chong of the Hyatt Regency Kota Kinabalu would be co-hosting lunch. As egrets pecked at the grassy lawns surrounding our cushioned pavilion, we feasted on wild-caught wrasse cured in calamansi salt, chicken slow-cooked in bamboo stalks, and a pile of river prawns baked with foraged greens.

Back at the Hyatt Centric later that afternoon, the Kita Conversations session got off to a sobering start with a keynote address titled “Being a Chef in the Pre-Apocalypse.” “Fully one-third of carbon emissions are associated with food and agriculture,” began Canadian chef Oliver Truesdale-Jutras, the impassioned founder of Singapore-based regenerative hospitality company Re:Growth. “Our industry needs to start doing our part by turning away from high input–based agriculture and finding producers who are doing the right thing.”

We only had a few hours to digest this before heading to the final event: a Sunday evening barbecue on the seaside lawns of the Shangri-La Tanjung Aru resort, which occupies its own little peninsula near the airport. A stiff sea breeze fanned the flames of the grills as the chefs—joined now by Johnson Wong, the thirtysomething chef-founder of Penang’s acclaimed Gēn restaurant; and Disimon Suchart of local hot spot Hearth—sliced and diced. As the sun sunk into the sea under darkening clouds, Kota Kinabalu’s fickle weather kicked up a rainstorm. But no matter; the grill stations were quickly moved to a covered dining terrace, and the chefs proceeded unfazed. Here, a grilled local sweet potato topped with nuoc cham–infused honey and brie from an artisanal cheesemaker in the nearby town of Kinarut; there, a beef sandwich with pickled wild ginger and mint relish, or smoked skipjack tuna enlivened by palm-heart sambal. The rain outside was brisk, but so too were our appetites.

Kita Food Festival returns to Singapore on March 12–17 with the Singapore Weekender, a six-day culinary event that will see some of the region’s top culinary talents come together to celebrate diversity and innovation though themed kitchen takeovers, four-hand dinners, and collaborative cook-ups. The festival will also host the Future of Food Symposium, the culmination of a seminar series exploring how the impact of climate and population change will affect what we’ll be eating in the future.

A view of Gaya Island from the 22nd-floor restaurant terrace at Hyatt Centric Kota Kinabalu.

This article originally appeared in the December 2024/February 2025 print issue of DestinAsian magazine (“Sabah in the Spotlight”).

A Taste of Sabah at the Kita Food Festival

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