The pasta smells amazing.
The chef is at the small stove in the pantry of his Bukit Jelutong workshop, plating it for a visitor who came to talk about cars. He used to run a restaurant nearby with two friends. Occasionally, he feeds the odd wanderer who came to learn more about Lotus cars.
In fact, the staff are fed from this pantry every day, as a matter of policy, whether by his hand or whatever they can whip up with the ingredients du jour.
Today, the prawns were fried in oil first flavoured with their shells. The pasta is organic (“It's the best,” he says) and the clams come out the moment they open, not a second later. Once the cooking liquid reduces, everything is brought together to make for a delicious pasta marinara.
At the helm of the kitchen, and Toycarz Garage, is Chris Poon, its Principal and Managing Director. Chris is particular about the way pasta marinara is made, as much as he is particular that coffee grinds need to be this fine to make for delicious espresso.
This is not the way most specialist garages introduce themselves. Then again, Toycarz Garage was never set up to be most things.
His family ran a medical lab in Johor Bahru that had carried them for years. None of the children wanted to take it over there, so they tried to transplant it to Damansara Perdana, where it did not survive.
What did survive was Chris’ stubborn affection for cars, which those who were close identified more clearly than he did.
“Since you like cars so much,” they told him, “why don't you just go and be a car salesman.”
He went and sold Volvos.
He was good at it, partly because he treated other people’s cars the way enthusiasts treat their own. He washed them. He parked them in the shade. The other salesmen laughed at how much he was investing into his customers.
One Swedish customer, the day he bought a Volvo S80, handed Chris a spare key and trusted him to look after the car. Every six months, Chris’ dad drove him out to Mont Kiara so he could pick it up, service it, wash it, send it home with the bill propped on the dashboard.
Five years later, when the customer was leaving the country, he told Chris to sell the car for him. Whatever Chris could get above market, he could keep. That was the first time Chris traded a car.
It started as care, not commerce. He will tell you the order matters.
Somewhere in the Volvo years, another customer suggested he move into real estate. Better margins. Chris tried it and hated it, because real estate had nothing to do with cars. He left to start Toycarz Garage with no real business plan beyond wanting somewhere to keep, polish and tinker with his own collection; buying and selling would be a sideline, never meant to become the business it has now become.
Lotus arrived slowly. He bought one, then another. Customers started bringing theirs in. Aftersales followed, which is the genteel industry term for what is in practice a long, meticulous and mostly unglamorous education in how to keep a small British sports car alive in a tropical country like Malaysia.
Fourteen years on, the workshop is unusually clean for a place that does this kind of work. Lotuses sit at every stage of repair and customisation; some on hoists, some opened down to the engine block.
In one corner, a pair of rare Club Racer seats waits to be fitted to a customised car Chris is building for a client who has wanted a Lotus a certain way since he saw one as a younger man. The seats were extraordinarily difficult to find, so Chris had them custom-made. Such is the reach of his partner-vendors.
The workshop reads as a Lotus specialist first and a hobbyist’s garage second, though Chris will tell you the order of those still matters too.
But the fourteen years have not always been smooth.
Covid was the worst stretch, and Chris talks about it with the resigned humour of someone who has spent a long time inside his own near-misses. Every decision they made in that period was the wrong one, he says.
Toycarz Garage survived anyway.
Chris says God has a sense of humour. Toycarz Garage tried very hard to fail, and somehow they just couldn’t.
The stories he tells about customers are how he explains what the business is for. A German client wanted to sell his Elise, and had to fly back into Kuala Lumpur to handle the paperwork and the transfer of ownership, the whole undignified end of a relationship between a man and a car.
He stage-managed it so it was painless. Then he removed the gear knob from the car, set it inside a glass box, and gave it to the seller as a keepsake.
“I think that speaks to the Toycarz Garage brand,” Chris says, “and what we want to do.”
You can read the gear knob two ways. One is sentimental. The other is operational. A niche marque, he argues, does not survive on transactions; it survives on the relationships around them.
“A niche brand needs deeper personalisation,” he says, “and a genuine relationship.”
That belief is older than Toycarz Garage. It predates the clients, the workshop and the company name. The Swedish customer’s key was the same idea, sixteen-odd years earlier, before there was a brand to attach it to.
What Chris wants to build next is a bridge. Most car enthusiasts in Malaysia know Lotus by reputation, fewer have driven one, fewer still own one.
He would like the workshop to be the place where that gap closes, where collectors who have been circling the marque can come in, look at the cars, see the quality of the work up close, experience the cars and decide that there is room in the garage for one more.
But for now, the pasta is almost finished, and the enticing cars behind us beckon.
This has been a wonderful afternoon for a car enthusiast.