It helps if you have a good appetite while visiting Malaysia. The street food is sweet, spicy and most importantly, delicious.
You don’t get fancy décor or service. There is a lot of plastic: the chairs, the tables, the bowls. There are no frills at these countless street stalls, hole-in-the-wall restaurants and hawker markets.
A short walk from KL’s shopping district is Jalan Alor, the Mecca of street food. Quiet during the day, the street takes a life of its own in the evening, when the pavement is full of plastic tables and chairs, the Chinese lanterns overhead are illuminated and the road fills with stalls selling every Malaysian food imaginable.
There’s no time to luxuriate over the menu; tables are shared and you have to be ready to order as soon as you sit. The sum of many delicious parts, Malaysian food is heavily influenced by Chinese, Indian and Malay cuisines.
This Chinese-style fried yellow noodles has a cult following in Kuala Lumpur. It is a dish of yellow noodles braised in thick dark soy sauce with pork, squid, fish-cake and cabbage as the main ingredients and cubes of crispy fried pork lard as garnishing.
You haven’t truly experienced Malaysian food until you thrill your taste buds with this bowl of rice noodles drenched in a sweet, sour and spicy broth topped with mint leaves, ginger flower and a scoop of fermented shrimp paste. It’s a dish that sums up Kuala Lumpur’s remarkable and trademark food culture: simple but delicious.
If you love fish you just can’t miss this steamed fish cake wrapped in banana leaf. The ground fish meat is mixed with chilli, turmeric and curry powder for some zing. Soy sauce and flour are added to get a thicker consistency.
There’s nothing quite like having everyone gathered around a steaming pot of food, taking turns to cook, and having the delicious smell of food wafting through the air. Lok lok basically means “dip dip”, which explains the concept of this delicacy. To indulge in this popular street food, all you have to do is take your pick from a variety of food items on satay sticks. These are then cooked and then tossed into a cup of sauce.
Rojak is a sweet and tangy dish that mixes cucumbers, turnips, tofu and varied fruits and vegetables in a sauce made from shrimp paste. Crushed peanuts add that extra crunch. A little stinky, sweet, salty, sour and spicy, rojak is an acquired taste.
Some call Nasi lemak Malaysia’s unofficial national dish. Made of fragrant jasmine rice cooked with pandan leaves and coconut milk they are wrapped in banana leaves and served with peanuts, sambal paste and anchovies.
A mountain of shaved ice is piled onto a bowl, topped off with red beans, green jelly- like rice noodles flavoured with fragrant pandan leaf and creamy coconut milk. And then comes the special Malaysian ingredient - dark brown, syrupy gula melaka, made from palm sugar, which is more smoky than saccharine sweet. The end result is a creamy and delightful dessert.
Meats on sticks over a BBQ – basic yet effective. You will see towering piles of skewers in hawker stalls that are tossed on the grill once you order. The meats are marinated with local spices and served with a spicy peanut sauce dip, or peanut gravy, slivers of onions, cucumbers and ketupat (rice cakes).
It is interesting to watch how the hawker twists and slaps the dough against the stove to make the bread. In its best form, right off the griddle, it’s flaky and crisp like a good croissant on the outside, soft and steaming and a little bit chewy on the inside.
This is what I call ‘performance tea.’ Watch as the man behind the counter skillfully “pulls” the tea (Teh Tarik literally means “pulled tea”) by pouring it interchangeably between two cups, in the process creating the foam that Teh Tarik is famous for.