I’m sitting with Leonard Tee at a marble-top table in the dining hall of Warong Old China. The Malaysian Chinese restaurant owner has been in business in Kuala Lumpur for 20 years, and this Chinatown address is the newest of his three venues. I ask a question that elicits a long pause for consideration: what dish best symbolises multicultural Malaysia? Tee finally speaks: “The quintessential Malaysian dish is nasi lemak because there’s a Malay, Chinese and Indian version.”
He may be right — this concoction of coconut-flavoured rice, crunchy ikan bilis (the local version of fried anchovies), raw cucumber, roasted peanuts and spicy sambal (chilli sauce) is a convenient choice to summarise, in a few spoonfuls, one of the world’s most complex multi-ethnic societies. In fact, Malaysia’s first astronaut, Dr Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, even took nasi lemak with him to outer space when he took flight in 2007.
Close to KL Sentral, the city’s main transport hub, Chinatown is the most accessible place to begin my mission of mapping the food scene in Malaysia’s gargantuan, multifaith capital. Fondly called ‘KL’ by
