Azalina’s began as a catering business in San Francisco. Chef Azalina cooked private events, sold food at farmers markets, and built the business one customer at a time.
Chef-led Malaysian pantry staples
Malaysian food from Chef Azalina’s kitchen, made for yours.
Azalina’s pantry started with the food we were already cooking. The sauces came out of years in restaurant kitchens, farmers markets, catering jobs, and family recipes, then were adjusted so they could work just as well at home.
They’re meant to be cooked with. Spoon them into a pan, use them as a marinade, build noodles or rice around them, or set them on the table and use as much as you want.
Chef Azalina
Meet Chef Azalina Eusope
Chef Azalina is a fifth-generation street food cook from Penang, Malaysia. She grew up in a kampung surrounded by family cooking, markets, hawker food, and a garden full of ingredients that made their way into the kitchen.
Much of what she learned came from cooking alongside her father and grandmother. Later, she trained at Raffles Hotel, working in both savory and pastry kitchens.
After moving to San Francisco, she started catering private events and selling food at farmers markets. La Cocina was part of those early years, as Azalina’s grew from a small food business into restaurants, packaged products, and larger-scale production.
Along the way, Chef Azalina built a 20,000-square-foot commercial kitchen and a 5,000-square-foot hydroponic microgreen farm. The scale has changed many times since those first market days, but she’s stayed close to the food and how it’s made.
Growing up in a Malaysian kampung, my childhood memories are filled with intoxicating scents from eating together in my Nani’s kitchen and roaming the family spice garden. My products are an homage to my traditions and these experiences.
Restaurant roots
The sauces came out of the way we cook at the restaurant.
A lot of the flavor in Malaysian cooking happens before the main ingredient ever hits the pan. Shallots, garlic, chiles, ginger, lemongrass, spices, acidity, sweetness, and fat all have a part to play.
That balance matters more to us than simply making something hot. A sauce can have plenty of chile and still leave room for the rest of the food.
For years, we made these flavors by hand for restaurant service, catering, and farmers markets. Ingredients were ground, fried, blended, tasted, and adjusted until they tasted the way Chef wanted them to.
The pantry line grew from that same cooking. We wanted the jars to be useful ingredients in their own right, not just sauces you drizzle over a finished plate.
From the restaurant to the pantry
We wanted people to be able to cook with these flavors at home.
Packaged products had been something Chef Azalina wanted to do for a long time. Customers were already asking how they could take the flavors home, and there still weren’t many Malaysian pantry products on American grocery shelves.
Turning restaurant recipes into jars took more work than simply scaling up a batch. Recipes had to become consistent from batch to batch. Ingredients had to behave the same way outside of restaurant service. The sauces still needed to taste like themselves after they were packed.
That process continues as the pantry grows, but the purpose is simple: make Malaysian flavors easier to cook with without turning them into something generic.
Why these sauces
More than heat.
A good sauce should do more than make food spicy.
Our sauces use chiles alongside ingredients like ginger, garlic, lemongrass, galangal, peanuts, black pepper, coconut, citrus, and spices. Each jar has its own purpose and its own personality.
Some are good straight from the jar. Others really come alive in a hot pan. Most can do both.
Easy to use
You don’t need to know Malaysian cooking to use these sauces. Put sambal on eggs. Toss peanut sauce with noodles. Cook vegetables with black pepper sauce. Use them with rice, seafood, chicken, tofu, or whatever you already have in the refrigerator. They’re pantry staples in our kitchen, and we want them to feel just as useful in yours.
Made from the way Chef cooks
The recipes start with ingredients Chef Azalina has cooked with for years. How the aromatics are prepared, when ingredients are added, and how sweetness, acid, spice, and salt come together all affect the finished sauce. That’s the part we care about preserving as the pantry line grows.
Chef Azalina built a large commercial kitchen and hydroponic microgreen farm to support the growing food business and future production.
Azalina’s opened its first brick-and-mortar location inside the Market Street food hall in the Twitter building.
Mahila opened in Noe Valley, giving Chef Azalina a full-service restaurant centered on Mamak cooking and a broader range of Malaysian dishes.
Azalina’s opened at 499 Ellis Street in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, with a tasting menu that gave Chef more room to cook through the different communities and food traditions of Malaysia.
Azalina’s continues to cook in San Francisco while the pantry side of the business reaches more grocery shelves. The sauces, sambals, peanut sauces, kaya, tea, and other products are becoming another way for people to bring Chef Azalina’s food into their homes.
We want to keep growing both sides of Azalina’s: restaurants where Chef can cook for people directly, and a pantry line that can reach people well beyond San Francisco.
Azalina’s Selected Honors
What matters to us
Good ingredients. Good cooking. Sauces you’ll actually use.
- We choose ingredients because they belong in the recipe, not because they make the ingredient list look good.
- Spice is only one part of the flavor. Sweetness, acidity, aromatics, salt, richness, and texture matter too.
- We make products we want people to open often, not jars that sit untouched in the back of the pantry.
- The restaurant and pantry are part of the same food business. What we learn in one continues to influence the other.
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