Asia Travel Guide

To eat inexpensively go to hawker stalls , traditionally simple wooden stalls on the roadside, with a few stools to sit at. They serve standard Malay noodle and rice dishes, satay, Indian fast food like roti canai, plus more obscure regional delicacies. Most are scrupulously clean, with the food cooked in front of you. Avoid dishes that look as if they’ve been standing around, or have been reheated, and you should be fine.

Hawker stalls don’t have menus and you don’t have to sit close to the stall you’re patronizing: find a free table, and the vendor will track you down when your food is ready. You may find that the meal should be paid for when it reaches your table, but the usual form is to pay at the end. Most outdoor stalls open at around 11am, usually offering the day’s nasi campur selection; prices are determined by the number of dishes you choose on top of your rice, usually about RM2-3 per portion. Hawker stalls generally close well before midnight.

Few streets exist without a kedai kopi, a coffee house or café , usually run by Chinese or Indians. Most open at 7am or 8am; closing times vary from 6pm to midnight. Basic Chinese coffee houses serve noodle and rice dishes all day, as well as cakes. The culinary standard might not be very high, but a filling one-plate meal costs a couple of dollars. If available, full meals of meat, seafood and vegetables cost about RM5.

On the whole, proper restaurants are places to savour particular delicacies found nowhere else, like shark’s-fin dishes, bird’s-nest soup, and high-quality seafood. In many restaurants, the food is not necessarily superior to that served at a good café or hawker stall - you’re just paying for air-con and tablecloths. Tipping is not expected and bills arrive complete with service charge and government tax. In the main, restaurants are open from 11.30am to 2.30pm and from 6 to 10.30pm.

Drink
Only in certain places on the east coast of the Malaysian Peninsula is drinking alcohol outlawed. Elsewhere, despite the Muslim influence, alcohol is available in bars, restaurants, Chinese kedai kopi, supermarkets and sometimes at hawker’s stalls. Anchor and Tiger beer (lager) are locally produced and are probably the best choice, although Carlsberg and Heineken are being marketed heavily. Locally produced whisky and rum are cheap enough, too, though pretty rough. The brandy , which is what some local Chinese drink, tends to be better.

Wine is becoming more plentiful and competitively priced too. There is a thriving bar scene in KL, Kuching and Penang; less so in other towns. Fierce competition keeps happy hours a regular feature (usually 5-7pm), bringing the beer down to around RM5.00 a glass. Some bars open all day (11am-11pm), but most tend to double as clubs, opening in the evenings until 2 or 3am. All night clubs are a relatively new development, and again liberal licencing seems to apply.

Malay cuisine is based on rice, often enriched with santan (coconut milk), which is served with a dazzling variety of curries, vegetable stir-fries and sambals, a condiment of chillies and shrimp paste. The most famous dish is satay - virtually Malaysia’s national dish - which is skewers of barbecued meat dipped in spicy peanut sauce. The classic way to sample Malay curries is to eat nasi campur , a buffet (usually served at lunchtime) of steamed rice supplemented by any of up to two dozen accompanying dishes, including lembu (beef), kangkong (greens), fried chicken, fish steaks and curry sauce, and various vegetables. Ather popular dish is nasi goreng (mixed fried rice with meat, seafood and vegetables). For breakfast, the most popular Malay dish is nasi lemak , rice cooked in coconut milk and served with sambal ikan bilis (tiny fried anchovies in hot chilli paste).

In Sabah , there’s the Murut speciality of jaruk - raw wild boar fermented in a bamboo tube, but the most famous Sabah dish is hinava, or raw fish pickled in lime juice. In Sarawak , you’re most likely to eat with the Iban, sampling wild boar with jungle ferns and sticky rice. A particular favourite in Kuching are bamboo clams, small pencil-shaped slivery delicacies which only grow in the wild in mangrove-dense riverine locations. These are called “monkey’s penises” by the locals.

Typical Nonya dishes incorporate elements from Chinese, Indonesian and Thai cooking. Chicken, fish and seafood form the backbone of the cuisine, and unlike Malay food, pork is used. Noodles ( mee) flavoured with chillies, and rich curries made from rice flour and coconut cream, are common. A popular breakfast dish is laksa, noodles in spicy coconut soup served with seafood and beansprouts, lemon grass, pineapple, pepper, lime leaves and chilli. Other popular Nonya dishes include ayam buah keluak, chicken cooked with Indonesian “black” nuts; and otak-otak, fish mashed with coconut milk and chilli and steamed in a banana leaf.

Chinese food dominates in Malaysia - fish and seafood is nearly always outstanding, with prawns, crab, squid and a variety of fish on offer almost everywhere. Noodles, too, are ubiquitous, and come in wonderful variations - thin, flat, round, served in soup (wet) or fried (dry). Malaysians eat mee any time of the day or night, and a particular favourite is a dish called hokkien mee : fat, white noodles with tempe in a rich soy sauce whipped up in three minutes flat by a wok chef at the side of the road.

The dominant style is Cantonese and the classic lunch is dim sum, a variety of steamed and fried dumplings served in bamboo baskets. Standard dishes include chicken in chilli or with cashew nuts; buttered prawns, or prawns served with a sweet and sour sauce; spare ribs; and mixed vegetables with tofu (beancurd) and beansprouts. For something a little more unusual, try a steamboat, a Chinese-style fondue filled with boiling stock in which you cook meat, fish, shellfish, eggs and vegetables; or a claypot - meat, fish or shellfish cooked over a fire in an earthenware pot.

North Indian food tends to rely more on meat, especially mutton and chicken, and breads - naan, chapatis, parathas and rotis - rather than rice. The most famous style of north Indian cooking is tandoori - named after the clay oven in which the food is cooked. A favourite breakfast is roti canai (pancake and daal) or roti kaya (pancake spread with egg and jam). Southern Indian food tends to be spicier and more reliant on vegetables. Its staple is the dosai (pancake), often served at breakfast time as a masala dosai, stuffed with onions, vegetables and chutney.

Indian Muslims serve the similar murtabak, a grilled roti pancake with egg and minced meat. Many south Indian cafés serve daun pisang at lunchtime, usually a vegetarian meal where rice is served on banana leaves with vegetable curries. It’s normal to eat a banana-leaf meal with your right hand, though restaurants will always have cutlery.