The Adventures of Bruce and Ian

After breakfast, we walked a short distance to Jalan Petaling, Kuala Lumpur’s open-air Chinatown market. Attracting a mix of locals and tourists, the market offers a full range of Chinese cuisine, handicrafts and clothing, in addition to peculiarly low-priced DVDs and designer handbags. We’d been exposed to the practice of hawking wares Malaysian-style the night before at Jalan Alor, but the vendors at Jalan Petaling were on a whole other level.

Binders of DVDs, children’s toys, shirts, jackets, sunglasses and just about everything else imaginable were waved in front of us, and calls of “Sir? Sir? Good deal! You buy!” were everywhere.

Haggling’s the name of the game at Jalan Petaling: everything’s negotiable.  If you were unimpressed with the price of an item you expressed interest in, odds are it would drop by twenty percent before you were five steps away from the stall.  I wanted to bring back one of the astonishingly cheap handbags for my girlfriend, but didn’t trust my haggling skills.

I have a tough time doing even the tamest of bargaining at low-key garage sales, and I knew I was out of my league in the lightning-fast trading and bickering that is Jalan Petaling’s lifeblood.  Thankfully, our guide Sarah had stronger nerves than I.

After I picked out a Prada bag that I thought would be well received, Sarah entered into a routine as old as commerce itself. After the “real” price of 100rm was dismissed by Sarah as “very expensive, lah” (the ubiquitous lah can best be approximated as being to Malaysia what eh is to Canada), a quick barrage of numbers, hand gestures, and exclamations of feigned outrage and disbelief began to fly back and forth between Sarah and the vendor.

In less than a minute, the price had dropped from 100rm to 30rm, approximately $10 Canadian. Who’d have thought that there was such a generous subsidy on Italian exports to Malaysia?

Not all of our ventures in Jalan Petaling were as successful. The vendor who sold us a t-shirt that had caught my eye was made out of stronger stuff, and would only go from 40rm to 25rm despite Sarah’s best efforts.

We rounded off our morning at the market with a refreshing drink made from longan (a lychee-like fruit) and gulan melaka (palm sugar), and hailed a cab to take us to the historic Batu Caves.

You’d be suprised that even after a night of feasting, we still woke up rarin’ to have a go at some good ol’ Malaysian breakfast foods.

Sarah picked us up at our hotel and we soon found ourselves walking on a busy street near Jalan Petaling.  We were so close to the actual road with cars zipping by I thought I’d be clipped by one and dragged to my doom.

The place that Sarah told us we’d be going to was called a Kopi Tiam.  The translation literally is “Coffee Shop,” but it was so much more.

I probably sound like a dumb tourist for being so enamored with what was basically a glorified food court, but hot danggit it was neat.
Basically, vendors rent out stalls in an open space (which is akin to a hotel lobby) and sell their specialized dishes.  No two vendors sell the same thing, and so when one visits a Kopi Tiam, they have a veritable smorgasbord of choices.

Now the difference between this and the food courts I’m accustomed to is that these stalls aren’t just franchaises or soulless extensions of a bigger company.  They’re run by the very people who make the food, who are passionate about their dishes and the keepers of a secret family recipe. No angsty teenagers out to make a quick buck here; only real, dedicated entrepreneurs who cook delicious foods for passers by.

We sat down and were greeted by a nice lady who took drink orders.  According to Sarah, this is the “landlord” or the owner of the Kopi Tiam.  Sarah then ordered two great examples of breakfast foods in Malaysia:

Nasi goreng

I love fried rice, and thought I had experienced the whole gamut of what the Asian world had to offer me with regards to this seemingly simple dish.  Yang Chow fried rice, Kim Chi fried rice, salted fish fried rice…I’ve tried them all, and they all spoke to me in their own way and charm.  Then I had Nasi Goreng (Malaysian Fried Rice).  I don’t know what it was, but this dish spoke to me in ways I could never imagine.  It was as though Jack Frost whispered sweet nothings into my ear on a hot summer day. Hands down, it was the best incarnation of my favourite dish ever.

The flavours were smoky, savoury, a little sweet…and all present in each individual kernal of rice.  I was blown away.

Mee prawn

Noodle soups aren’t really my bag. I enjoy them once in a while but I’ll never crave them. And of course, being Vietnamese, it’s a bit tough to dethrone the champion of noodle soups in my heart, Pho (Beef noodle soup!). Mee prawn was a good tasting dish, the noodles and toppings were cooked nicely, and the broth tasted decent enough…but the dish on the whole was nowhere near complex or memorable as other dishes we had in Malaysia. That being said, it was a well needed change from all the fried or baked bread based foods we’d been eating.

Needless to say, by the end of breakfast I was a very happy man (as the pictures surely indicate).

One thing I should note are the utensils. The interesting thing about them is that each dish comes with its own set of forks, spoons or chopsticks – but how do each of the vendors know which utensil is theirs?

A dab of colored paint marks the property of each vendor, so when the bussers come to take away spent dishes, they know where every fork, spoon and chopstick is supposed to go!

…HEY I thought it was interesting ok??

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