Jars of tasty, quick meals
Using all-natural ingredients, this bar is for the health-conscious, writes Aznim Ruhana Md Yusup
IT is quite a squeeze at the Wise Crafters Oatsome Bar, with myself, photographer Rosela Ismail and photography intern Syakirah Azhar. Located in Damansara Utama, the outlet is less than half the size of a full shoplot and there is only a small bar inside plus a table for two outside.
Founder Samantha Ng explains that Wise Crafters is mainly an online, subscription-based meal provider. So the shop, which opened more than a year ago, wasn’t exactly designed for people to hang out at.
But she needed a physical location as a base to make her food items and to have somewhere convenient for her customers to pick up their orders.
Ng started making overnight oats for herself several years ago while working in the corporate world. But then her colleagues started ordering, so it became a business. She even roped in her father to help — mostly to give him something to do after he moved to Kuala Lumpur at his children’s request following a health scare.
The main offering at Wise Crafters are oatmeals, soaked overnight in soya milk and packed in glass jars with ingredients such as mango, dragon fruit, almond and chia seeds.
“Overnight oats is not difficult to make but what we offer is convenience,” says Ng.
“It’s also full of flavour because we’ve trialled the mix of ingredients and we have many different varieties so people won’t get bored eating oatmeal every day.”
MEAL REPLACEMENT
The first dish that I get to try is the Golden Royal Oatsome Bowl, a smoothie consisting of blended oats, chickpeas, mango, turmeric and banana. It’s topped with socalled energy balls, which look like meatballs but are made of medjool dates. Other garnishes include chia seeds, carrot and kiwi fruit. It’s refreshing and slightly sweet, while tasting mainly of banana.
The next smoothie bowl is called Coco Indulgence, blended from oats, cacao nibs and bananas and topped with strawberry, kiwi fruit, cashew nuts and dried goji berry.
It has a thick consistency and a strong scent of chocolate. Some of the cacao nibs, made from the cracked bits of dried cocoa beans are left in its original form as a garnish, giving the smoothie a crunchy texture.
Because these dishes are called a smoothie, some customers have mistaken them for a beverage and have even asked for a straw. Ng explains that her smoothie bowls are nutrient-rich meal replacements, not a drink.
A more familiar dish for a meal is a salad, in this case a Citrus Garden Quinoa Salad. Ingredients include red cabbage, tomato, carrots and sliced almond as well as quinoa. A boiled egg with a still-creamy yolk sits on top.
The dressing is a mix of vinegar, lemon and orange juice, but I don’t find it tangy enough to my liking. According to Ng, this is due to customer preference as they cannot take food that is too sour.
But for something really sour, customers can try the shop’s selection of kefir drinks. It’s a probiotic drink made using live culture
that is so strong-tasting that Ng serves them to me in shot glasses.
My first shot is the Granny Smith apple kefir drink, which is slightly effervescent but perhaps no more acidic than the fruit. Same goes for the passion fruit kefir.
Meanwhile, turmeric ginger kefir is recommended for people with bloat problems. It’s slightly bitter, and the most traditional medicine-tasting of the bunch. The milk kefir tastes similar to Greek yogurt, which is more tart than regular yogurt, but thinner.
Ng sends me home with her oatmeals, and recommends that I eat one jar a day for dinner. I particularly enjoy the oatmeal with aloe vera and fresh longan, while the dragon fruit and blueberry oatmeal is also good.
In fact, all the oat meals are wonderful so kudos to Ng and her team for getting the right mix of ingredients for what’s usually a bland dish.