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.