Debbie Lee

July 13th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under

Have you ever met a happy person? How often have you had the pleasure of sitting down and talking to someone and coming away totally enriched and imbued by their enthusiasm for life and their positive outlook. I hope that it is often for you and I had the pleasure of meeting one such person recently. Her name is Debbra Lee, our personality of the month.

Hers is a privileged life, proud owner of three restaurants (Fit For Two, Bijou (read Guilt Free Designer Food), Bianco (read Pure Pleasure at Bianco) and soon a pastry shop called Bissou ), mother of a cute four year old girl (Jordan), wife to a kind considerate and (very cute, methinks) husband and friends with the who’s who of Kuala Lumpur’s top chefs, an excellent cook, a fitness instructor to pregnant mummies and babies, homemaker, reads Martha Stewart and other cookbooks for bedtime read, great friend to at least 6 lucky people and most importantly a very happy person!

Well, at the risk of sounding sour grapish, it should be easy for someone of means to be happy right, you would say. But remember, remember, money doesn’t buy happiness they say. So what is Debbra Lee about then¡­let’s unravel the secret.

I ask Debbie (as she is fondly known) if she has heard of this new craze in town called “The Secret” and she said yes. In fact she practiced it and visualized the car she wanted and lo and behold, she got a brand new SUV for her birthday, and it only took two months for the wish to materialize. But truth be told, I think she could have written her own version of the Secret.

But life hasn’t always been smooth for Debbie, at seventeen, her parents went through a tough divorce and she went back to England (her maternal homeland) with her mum and brother. She and her brother, resolved that they would not mess up their lives like other kids of divorced parents and would live their lives the best that they know how despite the hurt.

She went on to do a degree in Statistics at a good university and came back to Kuala Lumpur to work as financial analyst and then the stock market crashed, that was way back in 1997 and she found not only had she lost her job and a career path that she had been preparing her life for but more importantly a deep loss of self identity.

All of sudden, she said, the world came crashing and she took the next best job that was as a career counselor in a local college before becoming leaving for England to pursue a course in fitness, something she always been interested in. Debbie is one of the first fitness Body Step instructor to be certified from Australia. And she was in the fitness circuit for a while before she on started her own Fit For 2 classes for pregnant mummies in 2001 in gyms around the Klang Valley and in 2004 decided that career as a gym instructor not only does not pay well and in the long term will take a toll on her body and looked for an alternative to earn passive income and voila, the ‘birth’ of “Fit For Two” gym and healthy food restaurant for pregnant mummies and kids came about (Fit For Two is located at Jalan Bangkung, Bangsar).

In November 2006, she and her husband bought over a caf¨¦ restaurant called Flinders and renamed it Bijou (meaning jewel in French), located at the Damai Apartment blocks in Mont Kiara and in January 2006, started Bianco (meaning “white” in Italian at The Tropics in Damansara Perdana) and Bissou, (meaning “kiss” in French) pastry place), her pet project, will be opened at Heritage Row, next to bar Savanh in July August 2007

A self confessed perfectionist as demonstrated during our interview at Bianco, when she asked the waiter to up the volume of the piped in music by about a ten percent so that it is just right for the customers’ pleasure, she is also very action oriented. The minute she thinks of an idea, she will execute immediately.

Question: Debbie’s secret to success

I think it is my attention to detail and my love for cooking. I cook daily at home for my family and I always cook and entertain. We usually do Christmas parties for 30-40 people and I always cook myself. So owning restaurants is just like throwing a party for the customers with the same attention to details but on a wider scale.

And it is the same love and attention that is poured into preparation of the food and serving of the food at the restaurant.

I am very much involved in the A to Z of the restaurants from the menu planning, recipes, aesthetics and concept. Whereas my husband is involved in the administration, manpower and finance aspect of the business.

In fact, a lot of the recipes like the smoked salmon spaghetti is how I would cook it at home. The Banofee Cake recipe is my own, the Elvis Presley dessert pizza is concocted by me. The Bianco Pizza special was an idea I borrowed from Pizza Express in London, about 60 to 70 percent of the recipes are my labour of love.

The whole idea is to create places for healthy and simple casual dining.

Debbies’ philosophy on life:

Always reconnect and rebalance and be thankful for all the things that you do have. Be positive in your thoughts and the thing about “The Secret” that most strike me was that we should always be pro something as opposed to anti something for instance be pro peace instead of anti-war so as to take away the negative connotation.

Always appreciate the things that you have. Whatever difficulty that we meet in life is in a way a preparation for something better. And if you are positive , positive things comes to you and I always believe in opportunities come knocking when you least expect it and till now I always meet with people, any new businesses that want to hook up with us, I will meet them. I don’t know if it will work but you never know. I also believe in giving back and I know how difficult it is to start when you are small and an unknown business entity.

And if someone upsets me, I usually try to see how it affects me I don’t tend to get worked up about things. Sure, sometimes people take advantage but I always believe what goes around comes around.

Debbie’s philosophy on health and fitness:

Eat well and eat healthily and I only drink wine on weekends. My priority is just about being stronger and healthier and that’s why I have a personal trainer to help make me strong physically.

Debbie’s philosophy on marriage and a great relationship

Have a respect for each others space and to trust. Don’t play mind games. Friends are always surprised why I “let” my husband go out and play football or basketball with the guys and they don’t think that he spends enough time at home , which is quite funny as I am okay about it because he lets me do my dance classes as well. It isn¡¯t the amount of time but the quality of time, but they don’t get it.

Always keep a balance in the relationship. I am strong character and a lot of men are intimidated but my husband is very supportive and the calmer of the two of us.

My mother has always taught me to pay my own way even when out on a date. The men can buy me a drink but no more, so that I am not obligated in anyway.

Debbie’s philosophy on motherhood:

We practice Positive Parenting with our daughter and in a way we do the same with our staff. We don’t believe in shouting at yelling at them.

We don’t tell our daughter she can’t do anything but emphasize on the positive for instance if she was carrying a plate full of food. Instead of telling her not to let the food fall, we teach her instead to keep the plate flat and focus on keeping food on the plate.

Debbie’s dream vacation:

I would love to stay in a villa in the north of Italy and travel all over the Tuscan Valley enjoying the food. To me the greatest joy of travel is eating the local foods and I would love to go to Italy. I would also like to enroll in cooking school in Italy for the pleasure of learning.

Debbie’s philosophy on her restaurants:

I won’t ever mix local foods in my menus local foods as the local food spice ingredients might mix with the more sensitive foods like cheese. And also as I am not knowledgeable about the food I am not able to pick out any errors which is why a lot of restaurants have quality consistency issue, because the owner or manager may not be sensitive to any changes in the food quality especially if the staff managing it is not good.

Since talents in the culinary circle is small, if we find any good people we will hire them first and try to find a way to maximize their talents. We also get to know a lot of chefs as we dine out a lot and we always compliment the chef by sending him or her a glass wine because they are personalities too and people tend to forget about them because they are not visible. This little gesture has helped us made quite a few friends.

As a company, we have a non-poaching policy because we don¡’t want others to do the same to us.

Debbie’s five year vision:

I don’t have one. I just live everyday and appreciate everyday and everyone daily. I want to make sure that the people that I love knows that everyday and every issue is resolved because you don’t know if there is a next day. I learnt this when early on when two of my best friends’ siblings who are also my friends died of freak accidents in their early twenties and thirties and it just hit me really hard about the fragility of life. Our next step is simply to ensure a proper team is set up in place and can run with minimal supervision from my husband and I. We work very hard and love every minute of it.

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