Travel log: Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia)

I recently came back from a weekend trip to Kuala Lumpur (KL), which must have shaved a few years off my life. Nothing screams living in the moment more than binge drinking and indiscriminate consumption of unhealthy but delicious foods. Unfortunately for me that sounds like an apt description of much of my life.

KL is a popular destination for Singapore foodies, especially those in search of richer, more authentic hawker food. We set off for the trip armed with recommendations of what to eat, and over the three days and two nights it felt as though I was continually ingesting either food or drink. By the end I felt like I had aged considerably – such was our excess – but it was worth it, and then some.

Yet after all that it would be hard for me to say that KL food is better than Singapore’s; the stand-outs were, of course, memorable, but there was the odd mediocre dish. I didn’t eat enough to compare the average standards, so there is nothing left to do but make a second trip! And third, and fourth trips, of course.

Overseas Restoran (海外天)

Located near the fringes of the busy Bukit Bintang area, this sleepy little Chinese restaurant was the first stop we made, and filled us with nothing but excitement and anticipation for the rest of the trip. We arrived just a little bit before they opened for dinner, and walked in to see the waiters and cooks having their staff meal in a corner of the restaurant. They welcomed us with gracious smiles, apologised for not being ready to serve anyone yet, and asked if we were willing to sit down and drink some tea while waiting for the kitchen to start up again. Their inviting manner won us over, and we settled down for what became a leisurely wait for our food.

The roast meats are the specialty at Overseas Restoran – whose name became all the more appropriate when the waiter told us that the bulk of their business came not from locals but from out-of-towners coming in from Singapore and Hong Kong for a taste of their famous char siew. We had to get an order of that, and also picked the roast duck, but not before we opened our palates with a helping of herbal soup.


This was the char siew. Unbelievably fatty, and coated with a syrupy glaze of barbeque sauce. Clearly the concept of carcinogens had not entered the consciousness of the kitchen, for the exterior was covered in delicious black char. I got the same feeling as I did when I was dining at 2941 in DC and eating Mishima beef. Back then, I remember thinking that I was swallowing butter instead of chewing into muscle fibre – such was the tenderness of the beef – and also concluding that comparing it to normal beef was just inappropriate. This was in a whole different category. The same thing applied to the char siew at Overseas Restoran – it did not fit the preconceptions of char siew that I had, and as such comparison was unfair. It was very, very good though.


But the true star was the roast duck. I could not explain why and how this was so good. The exterior wasn’t crispy like how I usually like it; the meat was not tough, but yet not overly marbled with fat. But it was exquisitely seasoned, and everything was just done perfectly to create amazing bite-sized bursts of flavour and texture. I racked my brain to figure out what it was that was so special about the roast duck and still could not come up with an answer. I think sometimes you don’t have to have perfect technique, or execute everything with such precision; sometimes a dish cooked with care, and with the selfless conviction of providing pleasure to the diner can result in a very tasty meal indeed.

Wong Ah Wah

Our next stop for Part 2 of dinner that night was Jalan Alor, formerly the red light district but now a street of outdoor food stalls and restaurants. The “mamak stalls” never cease to amaze me – the entire workstation, including the stove top, is usually no wider than the armspan of an average person. And yet, standing in front of the stall and in all probability not moving his feet for the entire duration of the night, the average hawker can whip up a variety of meats, noodle dishes, vegetables. Jalan Alor is alive in the sense that you can feel the hunger in the air – the hunger of the people there who are in search of good food, on the cheap, in bustling, ramshackle environments. They just want to eat, and eat well.

(Just as an aside, why is it that all the good food always sprouts up around the red light districts, especially in Asian cities at least?)


These are the BBQ chicken wings at Wong Ah Wah at the end of Jalan Alor. The perfect marinate of honey and soy sauce, cooked over a charcoal fire. I thought they were delicious, but then again I think all wings are delicious. Buffalo wings, teriyaki wings, barbeque wings, they’re all good.


In the middle is spicy la-la, and in the foreground is kang kong. There is absolutely no combination like spicy food and cold beer. It is one of life’s greatest pleasures. I feel for people who do not eat spicy food, because they will never get to experience the immense satisfaction in numbing your taste buds with searing heat, before cooling them down with an ice cold beer. You don’t even need good beer, in fact the beer should in fact preferably be cheap and light. Just thinking about that combination makes me hungry.

Sek Yuen

For dinner the next night we went to Sek Yuen, another recommendation for good Cantonese tze char cuisine. Now this place is something else. It is legitimately stuck in a decade from long ago. And when I say long ago, I mean it. The restaurant takes up two shophouses, and one is clearly a later addition – it looks cleaner and is actually air-conditioned. But it is the other that I recommend eating at, for an experience tinged with history.

The feeling you get at Sek Yuen, apart from that of stepping into a time warp, is one of going to someone’s house for dinner. The staff all have that motherly/fatherly/grandmotherly/grandfatherly look, and are constantly scurrying around trying to anticipate your needs, as if you were a visitor from afar who had dropped in unannounced in hopes of a good meal. There is no menu, so you order what you want to eat, and if they can accommodate you they will. It is an interesting concept, and one that I wanted to take advantage of. But I figured that since it was our first (and only) time at the place, we should defer decision-making responsibility to the kitchen, and order what they felt to be their own specialties.


This place really should be a National Heritage Site of some sort.

You know the food is good when it is all gone and you realise that you have forgotten to take pictures. This is the only one I managed to snap, of the deep-fried garoupa in sweet and sour sauce - after we had devoured it, of course.


The standouts here include the fish dish that we had, and also a Cantonese staple of braised pork with yam slices. My mother loves this dish because when she first moved in with my dad and his family, this was one of the first dishes she ate that she had never tried before. My dad’s family’s maidservant at the time made this dish particularly well, and to this day it brings back fond memories for my mom, of her newly-wed days and the initial pages of what was a new chapter in her life. For my part I just like to eat it, so I am happy when anybody makes it for me. It is deceptively difficult to do well, just like all Chinese food, so when I find a good version I make a mental note of it.

We had a lot of other stops along the way too, but these I felt were the standouts. Perhaps I shall continue this in time to come, with a write-up of the other places we visited in KL. For now, I would recommend these places as must-tries for any visitor to KL.