One Recipe across Three Generations
I was born in 1971, the youngest of three children, and grew up in Kuala Lumpur. Before any of this, I was a radio DJ, a club DJ, and a television presenter in Malaysia. Music was my world.
In 1999, I moved to Amsterdam with my wife Véronique, a born and raised Amsterdammer. I fell for the city the moment I arrived and have lived here ever since.
In the Netherlands, I switched to branding and media. The DJ career made way for a different kind of storytelling. In 2017, I started helping a Belgian artisanal food supplier with their communication. Almost a decade of working with chefs and food professionals will do something to you. It confirmed what I already suspected: that my real passion, the one that had never left me through every career change, was food.
Charlie's Pickles launched in 2026. It took me decades and one empty jar to get here.
Charlie
My father Charlie usually cooked on weekends till he retired. Then, he became the household's full-time feeder, claiming the kitchen as his domain.
Charlie's kitchen had one non-negotiable: music. Always on, always loud, always eclectic. Nat King Cole, Charlie Pride, Jim Reeves, Boney M, Biddu, ABBA, Herb Alpert, Los Indios Tabajaras...and later, the music I played in clubs and on radio would find their way onto his playlists including to everyone's utter shock one afternoon, 2Unlimited! Every dish Charlie made had an extra melodic ingredient. I suspect, that's what made his food magical.
While his music collection was wide enough to mostly hear something new wafting out of the speakers, one dish on constant rotation in Charlie's kitchen was saltfish padda, because each batch he made didn't last very long.
That is the first thing you need to know about padda: enough is never enough.
Charlie passed away in 1994. The padda recipe, though, outlived him.
Lily
My mother Lily was the standard-bearer at home. The way the house ran, how well we did at school, and what was cooking the kitchen, even after it became Charlie's kitchen. She was an amazing cook herself, which meant Charlie knew how to handle pressure because he never disappointed Lily with his food! She remained the litmus test. If Lily approved, it was good.
Two things about this brand are entirely her doing: she was the first person to say out loud that Charlie's saltfish padda could be a business. And she came up with the name.
Charlie's Pickles is named for my father. But it was my mother's idea.
Where the Recipe Comes From
My grandfather Michael Sebastian John was born in 1882 in Trivandrum, Travancore, in what is now Kerala. My grandmother Isabella Rozario was born there too, on a Saturday, the 6th of October, 1894. They emigrated to Malaya in the early 1900s and built their life there.
Isabella brought her recipes from India. She taught them to her daughters. Her daughters taught Charlie. That is how saltfish padda travelled from the Malabar Coast to a kitchen in Kuala Lumpur, and how it eventually found its way to Amsterdam.
Three generations. One recipe. No written instructions at any point, merely a culinary baton passed on from kitchen to kitchen.
The Jar That Changed Everything
I had been cooking padda in Amsterdam since the day I arrived in 1999. I gave jars to friends. People liked it. I thought nothing more of it.
Then, at Christmas 2025, I gave a small jar to a friend named Fred as a gift. Less than a week later, he sent me a picture of the empty jar with a message wondering if there's more.
That was the moment. I sat down with two chefs shortly after and asked them what they thought. Both of them, independently, said the same thing: there is something in that jar that could be a real business.
I will be honest with you. I was the last person to believe it. For a long time, I assumed padda was too particular a taste for the European palate. I had been making and sharing it for twenty-six years and had somehow talked myself out of taking it seriously. The jar that Fred emptied fast broke that particular piece of stubbornness.
Why Amsterdam
Amsterdam has 180 nationalities. You can find almost any ingredient from Africa, South America, or Asia in the city's street markets, supermarkets, and wholesalers. For a food lover, it is effortless.
There is also history working in the product's favour. The Dutch spent centuries trading around the world, including the Far East. That history created a genuine openness to spice and unfamiliar flavour that you feel in the food culture here. Launching an artisanal condiment made from saltfish in rich infused chilli oil in Amsterdam was not a gamble. It felt like the most natural thing I could have done.
Véronique and Amsterdam between them made Charlie's Pickles inevitable. She kept me cooking padda for twenty-six years. The city gave it somewhere to land.
What I Believe
Look at any condiment shelf in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. You will find hot sauce, pesto, salsa, crispy chili oil, a dozen varieties of mustard. What you will not find is this: a saltfish pickle with the salty-sweet-sour balance of padda, with that spice depth from cumin and ginger and garlic, preserved in the same logic that kept coastal Indian kitchens fed through monsoon seasons for generations.
The flavour is not on that shelf anywhere. I looked.
What I found, once I started paying attention, is that this is not a condiment people found and rejected. It is a condiment people never found. The reaction is not "interesting but not for me." The reaction is "where has this been?"
You will experience love at first bite. I have watched it happen enough times to say that with complete confidence.
Charlie was the life of the party. Now his spiced fish pickle is.
What Comes Next
Charlie's Pickles is the beginning, not the whole story.
The range I am building moves outward from padda: other variants including shrimp and a vegetarian version, hot sauces built on the same South Asian spice logic, and a series of special editions covering heritage dishes that risk disappearing. Fermented and preserved foods that last long, need no refrigeration, and carry real flavour and real memory.
Two things drive this. The first is that there are food traditions worth preserving — recipes that exist in the kitchens of diaspora communities and almost nowhere else — and someone should be writing them down in the form of a product. The second is that fermented and preserved foods are one of the more practical answers to food security we have. They are ancient technology. They work.
In 2030, I hope the person eating Charlie's Pickles is someone who discovered it on a shelf in a city they were visiting, or was given a jar by a friend, and could not stop after the first spoonful. The same way my friend in Amsterdam could not. The same way Véronique could not, ever since she ate it for the first time in Charlie's kitchen in Kuala Lumpur.
The story started in Trivandrum in the 1880s. It is still going.
The jar is the best introduction I can give you.
