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The Kita Food Festival, celebrating Southeast Asia’s rich and diverse food scene, returns to the region for its fourth edition this year, kicking off with events in Kuala Lumpur in September, before continuing in Singapore in the early part of 2025.
From September 4-8, 2024 Kita will be hosting the Kuala Lumpur Weekender, with a series of four hands dinners and kitchen takeovers scheduled. Chefs cooking include Prin Polsuk of Bangkok’s Samrub Samrub Thai, who’ll be taking over Raw Kitchen Hall, and Hans Christian of Jakarta’s August, an Asia’s 50 Best One to Watch, who’ll be cooking at Akar Dining for a four hands with Aiden Low.
The Weekender will culminate, in a culinary sense, with the Big Sunday Barbecue on September 8, with chefs from restaurants including Mumbai’s Noon and Kuala Lumpur’s own Dewakan taking over the grills.
Simultaneously, Kita will be hosting a number of thought leadership events, including A Food Affair on September 7 in the Malaysian capital. An evolution of the festival’s Kita Conversations format, A Food Affair will open up the discussions to a wider, foodie as well as industry audience, with a full day of masterclasses, talks, panel discussions, and an artisanal marketplace.
This isn’t the end for Kita Conversations, however. The format will kick off with three seminars in Singapore in January and February, “exploring topics such as how we source food in a resource-challenged world, how we stretch the food that we have to feed the world, and how we find alternative food crops” according to Kita. It will culminate with an ambitious symposium bringing together as many as 400 F&B “professionals, educators, and enthusiasts for a full day of keynote presentations and industry sharing sessions.” Speakers include chefs Vanika Choudhary of Noon and Ben Devlin of Pipit in Pottsville, Australia.
Kita Horizons chefs
Kita’s young chef mentoring program, Kita Horizons, will also return this year and has already begun, with 15 young chefs getting to experience “parts of the industry that they would otherwise not gain access to.” The chefs have already taken part in masterclasses and farm tours, and will be looking to put all their new knowledge into practice on September 8 when cooking at a special invite-only Thank You Dinner.
Kita Food Festival is the “brainchild” of Dewakan chef-patron Darren Teoh, food journalist Leisa Tyler, and entrepreneur Adrian Yap. The trio’s goal is to “highlight Southeast Asia’s emerging culinary scene as well as inspire a new generation of talents by exposing them to a community of chefs, producers, and game changers in the industry.”
Tickets for the Kuala Lumpur Weekender are available from the Kita website, where you’ll find more details about the program. Tickets for Singapore, along with more details about the events there, will be released in September (check back on FDL for updates).
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