Life after Alma: Chef Haikal Johari starts new chapter with one Michelin starred Avant in Bangkok

Chef Haikal Johari can’t recall anything about the motorcycle crash that left him paralysed from the neck down in October 2015. After the accident in the resort town of Pattaya, Thailand, he was airlifted back to Singapore, where his doctors were unsure that he would ever walk on his own again.

But Haikal’s determination would see him back in the kitchen in a matter of months. 

At the time of the accident, he had already made a name for himself in Thailand, where he opened Ember, a fine-dining restaurant ahead of its time in Bangkok’s then-sleepy dining scene, in 2006. 

After the accident, Haikal was approached by Pote Lee, owner of Water Library and Alma by Juan Amador, the Singapore outpost of the three-Michelin-starred Amador in Vienna, to work at Alma. His reduced mobility was never an obstacle, and less than eight months after the crash, he was part of the team that won a star in Singapore’s first edition of the red guide in 2016. 

Later that year, Haikal became Alma’s head chef and retained the restaurant’s rating throughout his tenure until 2022. 

After opening the casual restaurant Alkove, Haikal decided to relocate back to Bangkok in 2023. There, he started Avant, a contemporary French restaurant in the Kimpton Maa-Lai hotel. Eight months after opening early last year, Avant received a Michelin star.

For him, it was the right point in his life to make the change with his children grown up and his yearning to concentrate on his own projects. “Singapore is so stressful,” he says about the fast-paced Little Red Dot. “People can be quite rude because everything has to be fast.”

On the other hand, in his new home in Thailand, “Work is work, work is serious. But after that it’s sabai sabai (Thai for easy-going).”

A new chapter 

Haikal describes opening Avant as “easy”, given that Kimpton Maa-Lai, well known for its wide-ranging initiatives to support diversity and inclusivity, including different physical and neurodivergent needs, couldn’t have been more accommodating. “They never saw me as disabled,” he says simply.

Coincidentally, the contemporary French restaurant, located on the 30th floor of the Kimpton in well-heeled Lang Suan, is just metres away from Ember’s original location near the edge of Lumpini Park. He had come full circle. 

Avant in French means “before”, a nod to his experience, while the expression en avant means “going forward”. For the 48-year-old chef, Avant means “my life moving forward as a disabled chef”, but also knowing when less is more.

“When you’re young, you want to impress by putting many things on the plate. You want to show off whatever you learned. But as you mature,” he says, defining his philosophy at Avant, “You appreciate and feature good ingredients.” 

Avant seats just 10 diners a night at a counter looking into an open kitchen. Keeping it small means the detail-oriented chef can monitor every aspect of the kitchen and dining room. Haikal makes it an honour to be with his team throughout the service.

His wheelchair is too wide and too low for the open kitchen, so he stands to one side. Master of all, he surveys every service in Avant.

“I can walk by holding the table, explaining dishes to the guests,” he says. He arrives hours before service to ensure that kitchen prep is up to his standards and quick to make any needed adjustments. Once guests are seated, cooks receive their instructions almost wordlessly. Spoons are brought to him to taste. Plates are shown.

It’s not without effort. Haikal isn’t wielding a knife or juggling sauté pans, but then again, neither would any chef de cuisine with a dependable team. For the most part, service is seamless, but when his eagle eye spotted team members narrowly avert a collision or some dribbled jus on a plate that is dabbed clean before it is sent out, there was no doubt that Haikal was making notes in his head for the briefing the next day.

Despite not being able to be hands-on, “I’m still there,” he says. “Because we’re a tiny kitchen, I’m able to see. I’m doing it together with them.”

It’s not always easy. “Sometimes I get frustrated not being able to show them things,” he reveals. It’s not always easy on his chefs, either. But ultimately, the hard work pays off. “They appreciate it,” He says about his chefs taking the time to get it right. “We’re a good team.”

And that is what is required when a perfectionist is running the kitchen. Haikal is a stickler for details. A case in point, he says, is Tetsuya Wakuda’s king crab and wasabi at Waku Ghin. “It’s nothing fancy, but it wowed me because of the temperature of the dish.” That attention to detail was an epiphany for Haikal, “the missing link that makes me want to pursue that kind of perfection”.

Ingredient-driven philosophy

Avant isn’t a wild deviation from the food he served at Alma. “What I’m trying to do here is a continuation of a journey,” he explains. The smaller space at Avant allows him to showcase his ingredient-driven philosophy: “Simpler is harder because you can’t mask anything,” from the quality of ingredients to the mastery of techniques. 

Haikal’s affinity with Japanese ingredients, which grew after a stint at Édition Koji Shimomura in Tokyo, shows in his dishes: Kochi tomatoes, karasumi (Japanese bottarga), matsutake mushrooms, samedarei (rough-scaled flounder), and sweet onions from Awaji.

Haikal also plays on French touches, from foie gras and vin jaune to ending the meal with a financier baked in a canelé mould. 

In a menu that is going from strength to strength, he singles out a favourite dish: his signature 36-month-old comté, where the cheese is turned into ice cream and topped with artisanal tofu from Osaka. It is served with a generous dollop of Russian Kaluga caviar — cured in Singapore by Caviar Colony — along with lemon jam, freshly grated wasabi, and a drizzle of single-origin French Arbequina olive oil.

The result is a plate that is elegant and packed with both freshness and moreish umami.

Haikal is clearly in his element in Bangkok. He has left Alkove in the good hands of his trusted head chef Sufian Zaini, who has been cooking with him for the past 27 years, but he is emphatic when he says that he has turned the page on fine-dining in Singapore.

He lives full-time in Thailand, where he can direct his energies to Avant and a café consultancy business.

Haikal is careful in expressing his gratitude for his time at Alma. “Alma was the incubation part,” he says. “It gave me a lot of inspiration.” But reading between the lines, it becomes clear that he was ready for a new environment. He notes that Alma had levels of management with less flexibility.

With just two other partners, Avant allows him to be more creative. “They understand what I’m trying to do here,” he says of the support he receives from them. 

He admits that he shies away from the spotlight but hints that having someone else’s name on the door didn’t give him the recognition he deserved. “Many people would say, ‘Why Alma by Juan Amador? There is nothing Juan Amador about it all except for the name’,” he commented.

As if that’s not enough to keep him busy, Haikal’s next project will bring a taste of Singapore to Bangkok. He plans to open a Straits cuisine concept. “Chicken rice. Laksa. Recipes from my mum that I really love that champion our heritage.”

It won’t be the first time he has ventured into bringing Singaporean food to the world: For several years, he ran a chicken rice shop in Osaka.

Many see Haikal’s long hours and hard work as proof of his strength in overcoming life’s challenges, but he sees it differently. “Resilience is a nice word,” he says with a grin. “But I think I’m just stubborn. I refuse to give up.”