25/02/2026
Collaboration with Darren Teoh of Dewakan, KL. May 2025.
It seems obvious now, though it shouldn’t have taken me this long to notice, that food—and the business of making it—has been humanity’s great civilising trick. Not language, not opposable thumbs, not even the wheel, but the habit of gathering around a flame, divvying up the spoils, and learning not to stab the dude next to you while he bastes the mammoth. Our evolution wasn’t written by geniuses, but by people who could cooperate without killing one another over the last onion.
Richard Wrangham, a British anthropologist and the sort of man you imagine drinks his tea hot, calls fire “the first technology that required people to cooperate daily.” Hell yes. Without it, we’d still be cold, cross, and chewing bark. History, when you scrape off the marble and gold leaf, is simply a record of people discovering that they were better off helping each other than going it alone.
And yet here we are—bathed in heated bath water, ice cream on hand, scrolling for meaning on glowing rectangles, congratulating ourselves on individuality while the species quietly melts in its own narcissism. The “entrepreneur of the self,” as Foucault put it, has replaced the neighbour, the colleague, the tribe. We diet alone, vote alone, die alone, and call it freedom. The data say it makes us sick; our bodies agree. Still, we queue up for the next genius, the next visionary CEO to save us from the consequences of acting like gods in a food court.
At Nouri and Appetite, we tried to build something that resists that drift—rooms where people meet, share, collide. The Four Hands dinners are the best of it: small rehearsals for cooperation. It’s not easy, mind you. Chefs today are bred for combat—culinary Olympians trained to out-fume each other in the colosseum of fine dining. “The best,” “the most,” “the top fifty”—silly baubles in an adolescent hierarchy whose banality is apparent to anyone who has ever cared and cooked for people.
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