Having said that (so here comes the excuse...), I do feel based on my whole two weeks over in that area of the planet, that there is enough overlap in some areas and I'm also not going to highlight much about Cambodia. So given the lack of focus on Cambodia, I feel (again...based on my whole all of two weeks there) that Singapore and Malaysia are close enough to one another to get away with this concept. Plus, I'm not writing three posts about food from one trip. Or two, even, because Cambodia certainly has an important, albeit small, part to play here. So here goes...my food post from the entirety of Southeast Asia that we visited in 2024.
And, yes, I'm drinking my beer with a straw in the photograph above. I'm wearing gloves and my hands are slippery. Not risking dropping beer.
So first of all, before I get to specific dishes or plates or whatever, let me say that my two favorite meals on this trip were in Malaysia and it's not even close. Overall (meaning not just for the food), I'd rank the three countries from top to bottom as Cambodia first, Singapore second and Malaysia a distant (and I do mean distant) third. But food-wise, the dishes I long for from this trip are two that I ate in Kuala Lumpur.
One of the two was a dish called nyonya laksa, a shrimp and tofu, spicy coconut milk noodle dish that just hit all the notes I want in a lunch dish (or any other sort of meal for that matter). We got it at the Old China Cafe in Chinatown in Kuala Lumpur and it was just awesome. I tried very hard on this trip to eat dishes that I really wasn't familiar with and nyonya laksa definitely checked that box. I really had very little idea what I was actually ordering. Maybe I got super lucky. If I did, it wasn't the only time I got that sort of lucky in Malaysia.
I'll save the other dish that I loved for last. Let's get to what else I found on the other side of the planet.
Nasi Lemak
Let's start this post off in earnest with the greatest hits. If there were one or two classic, can't miss dishes that we HAD to have in Singapore and Malaysia, one was definitely something called nasi lemak (and the other is the next dish in this post). And if you didn't know it, nasi lemak is the national dish of Malaysia, not that labeling it as that explains the dish in any way.
Sometimes the best sorts of food are simple, simple, simple. Nasi lemak for sure is one of those. Rice cooked in coconut milk; cucumbers (or you might skip those things if you are not pro-cucumber); a dried anchovies and peanuts concoction called ikan bilis; and an egg of some sort (we ate this dish with both fried and halved hard-boiled eggs, although not at the same time) along with some sambal on the side pretty much forms the base of a typical nasi lemak plate.
Much like the ubiquitous rice and beans in Costa Rica, nasi lemak can make up any sort of meal, be it breakfast, lunch or dinner. Maybe it's eaten just plain for breakfast and maybe you add some chicken or a banana-leaf-wrapped otah (or spiced fish cake) for the later meals but nasi lemak is eligible for a place on the table at any Malaysian or Singaporean mealtime.
Best nasi lemak on our trip? In Singapore, but that's probably because we didn't eat it in Malaysia except at our hotel. There's something about this coconut rice. The toppings can for sure affect the quality of the dish, especially if you get a perfectly fried and juicy chicken wing on the side, but that coconut rice...whoever invented that stuff was onto something for sure.
The picture above is from The Coconut Club in Singapore. It was definitely the best nasi lemak of the trip, although it would have been better with the chicken wing from Selera Rasa Nasi Lemak at the Adam Road Food Centre. Coconut Club's chicken was a touch dry.
Chili Crab
This was my food splurge in Southeast Asia. I knew a meal of chili crab was going to cost me a lot and I ignored it anyway. I also knew it was going to be super messy. Whatever.
Chili crab is basically a cooked Singaporean mud crab doused in some kind of spicy tomato sauce. You get the entire animal chopped up into pieces, shell and all, and just pound away at this thing until it's all gone. It's some tough going at some points. Despite providing you with a hefty set of crab crackers to open that shell, there's some work here involved. I've eaten other meals of crabs in shells but I've never seen any shell as thick as these mud crabs. I'm estimating the thickness of the claws approached 1/16 of an inch. It's basically like cracking a thick piece of strong plastic. No easy task.
A whole lot of research about where to get some really excellent chili crab led me to Keng Eng Kee (or K.E.K. for short) Seafood. It's one of their specialties; they have been around since the 1970s; they are on their third generation of ownership; they are Anthony Bourdain-endorsed; and they are not in a super accessible area with tons of tourist foot traffic. Seemed like a good combination.
There's no doubt in my mind that this was a good choice. It was open-air. It was packed. There were plastic chairs. There was a time limit to the table. And we were looked at with some skepticism when we showed up and asked if we had a reservation. We did. Of course we did. And I swear someone somewhere started the clock as soon as we sat down.
We didn't use all our time. We can eat quickly. Even if it's a whole crab that requires cracking.
I think as a dining splurge, this was worth doing once. I've said it before and I'll say it again...I don't understand why crab costs so much (with the possible exception of Dungeness crab). This was a good meal and it was tasty (although sweet more than spicy) and it was completely authentically Singaporean. But at a $95 SG per kilo price (that's about $70 or so US), I feel I can get something better for less.
My crab weighed about 0.9 kilograms. Do the math on the cost, if you are so inclined.
Hawker Markets
Some of our food experience on this trip required a lot of research and a lot of looking to find the best, the most traditional, the most Southeast Asian food we could find. Some...but not all. One thing that was obvious to us before we even booked our flights to Singapore and Malaysia and everywhere else we stopped was that our culinary experience in Singapore had to include a lot of eating at the country's various hawker markets.
Why hawker markets? Well, because it seems like every TV show we watched, every blog post we clicked on and every travel guide we read said we had to get to these places at mealtimes. Heck, Newton Food Centre is the first place that Nick Young and Rachel Chu go to get some food in Crazy Rich Asians after they get picked up at Changi Airport. Hawker markets are in vogue. Hawker markets are hip. We had to get to multiple, multiple hawker markets in Singapore. There was no question or no option really about this. This was going to be a project in and of itself.
Maybe I ought to take a step backwards here and explain what a hawker market is. Quite simply, it's an open air market with multiple stalls which usually feature one or two signature dishes and each stall only serves those particular dishes. Sounds simple, right? It's not. It's way, way deeper than that. I am sure there are people out there who would hail hawker markets as the keepers of traditional Singaporean (with all its Malaysian, Indian, Chinese, etc. influences) dishes. And those people wouldn't be wrong. Hawker markets are for sure preserving the area's culinary traditions. And they are doing it at insanely low prices, and that includes the stalls which have been Michelin listed or Michelin starred. Not kidding. Looking for cheap and amazing food in Singapore? Put some hawker markets on your list.
We did. Our itinerary for this trip had four hawker markets on it and we made it to all four. There are more. We just picked four that were closest to the other things we were looking to do while in Singapore.
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| Chicken rice from Maxwell Food Centre (top); Paneer Tikka from Tekka Centre (bottom). |
We tried to mix it up at the hawker markets.
We went with the internet's advice at the Maxwell Food Centre and Adam Road Food Centre and got the chicken rice and nasi lemak, respectively, which is supposed to be the top of the top dishes (although admittedly the internet seemed to be split on the best stall at Adam Road). We stood in a very long line at Maxwell that went very quickly on our first day in Singapore and we stood in a fairly short line at Adam Road that took about 45 minutes between the time we started queuing and when we got our food.
At the other two spots, we winged it and just picked what looked or sounded good. No advance research, just pick a spot and go with it. Usually the conventional wisdom was to go with the longest line on the supposition that people know where the good stuff is. We didn't do any of that. Standing in two lines was enough.
In two of the four places, I picked something that I really was completely unfamiliar with. There were two things on my nasi lemak plate at Adam Road that I just ate without understanding what I was eating and I ordered a carrot cake at Newton Food Centre with really no clue what I'd be handed, although I was pretty sure it wasn't some brown cake with carrot shreds, walnut and cream cheese frosting. It wasn't. It was basically a white radish omelet with a side of spicy red sauce (picture below).
And I did figure out what one of the two mystery items on my nasi lemak plate was. It was the aforementioned spiced fish cake or otah. I still don't know what the other thing was.
So was it good? Absolutely. Everything we ate at all four hawker markets was really good, quick and fresh and totally unlike anything we can get quickly at a restaurant or stall here at home. And it was all super, super cheap. The paneer tikka in the picture above cost me $4 SG, and that included the made to order garlic naan. I was lamenting that we didn't have enough cash in the nasi lemak line because I couldn't believe the thing that I was about to ordered cost $4. I thought the sign said $14.
Was food from a hawker market the best thing I ate on this trip? No it was not. But for the cost, it blew almost every other dish that we ate out of the water and it wasn't even close. I could easily eat three solid meals a day from hawker markets and expect to spend less than $15 US total for the whole day. And that's not, by the way, a bad strategy for staying well fed in Singapore I'm sure.
Sugar Cane Juice
One of the peculiar things about eating at the hawker markets is you can't get both your food and drinks at the same stalls. We found food at about 90% of the stalls and the other 10% were drinks only. And here's where I found one of my food quests for this vacation: sugar cane juice.
Order a cup of sugar cane juice and the stall owner will whip out a few stalks of bamboo-looking things (spoiler alert: it's sugar cane), split them in half and then feed them through a machine that squeezes all the juice from the sticks. The juice goes into a metal container just below the machine; the rest of the woody cane goes into the trash, although a little of the pulp ends up with the juice. The juice then gets run through a very fine mesh sieve (don't want to drink the pulp) and then poured over ice. Voila: sugar cane juice.
This was actually refreshing and not too sweet (I imagined it would be super sweet). I'd have this stuff on its own or as a dessert drink. I'm not sure it was the best accompaniment to my carrot cake but this was a successful quest. When else am I going to drink freshly pulped sugar cane?
Salted Egg Fish Skins
There are foods out there that are just so unusual and tantalizing (and not always in a "wow that sounds incredible!" way) that I just have to sample them when I travel. I don't mean like monkey's brains or some other sort of offal or something really disgusting like the chicken with cream clam sauce burger that we found in a 7-11 in Singapore. I mean something simpler. Something that just makes you wonder why would anyone ever make this and stick it in a bag on a food shelf somewhere. On this trip, that food was salted egg fish skins.
And yes, the chicken with cream clam sauce burger was real. Why? It's like someone just picked a bunch of ingredients and just put them together with no thought whatsoever as to whether it would be good.
So there's nothing mysterious about salted egg fish skins. They are what they sound like. They are pieces of fish skin dipped in salted duck egg yolks and cooked before being sealed into a bag and placed on a grocery store shelf. They are like potato chips. Only made with fish skins instead of potatoes.
Singaporeans apparently love these things. I do not, although I did eat the whole bag. They weren't objectionable or anything. Maybe it's a cultural thing or a practice makes perfect thing but I'm just not conditioned to crave fish skins as a snack. Glad I did this once. Probably not a repeat customer. It's not like the sugar cane juice.
Durian
OK...so it had to happen sooner or later that I'd finally sample durian while traveling. I wasn't going to. I swear. They have pieces of fresh durian very visible and very, very securely wrapped on market stalls in Singapore's Chinatown and I had no inclination to pick up a packet and try it. The airport got me here.
If you don't know what durian is, it's a fruit that grows in the tropics that some people describe as custardy and others (to be clear here...most others) describe as having the smell and flavor of rotting meat. Durians are banned on the Singapore MRT system because of the risk of their smell. Singapore's not alone in this kind of prohibition. We found the same sort of ban on the buses in Zanzibar last winter. I have really no desire to try a fruit that smells like rotting meat, but clearly people must like this stuff. I mean, they do seem to have a lot for sale in some spots.
Which brings us to the Kuala Lumpur airport with a little time to kill.
I'm sure if you've traveled to anywhere international you are familiar with the stores at the airport that sell chocolates or whatever it is that has some sort of connection to the country you are leaving. They had a couple of these stalls at the KL airport and among the various boxes of goodies, there was a display of durian filled dark chocolates. And there were samples.
Of all the durian experiences I could imagine, eating a tiny candy that is pretty much equal parts dark chocolate and durian was about the best-case scenario I could ever cook up. Plus it's free. There was something about this situation that I couldn't say no to. I picked up one of the individually-wrapped chocolates, opened the tiny little packet, smelled it and then popped it into my mouth and bit down.
I'll say this: it's a good thing they had a lot of other individually-wrapped candies hanging around the airport because I needed about five or six other types of chocolate samples to erase that memory. And quick. Rotting meat? I'm not sure about that but something not good was in my mouth. If this my reaction to about as little durian as you could ever have, I'm passing in the future. Including in airports.
Pandan
Believe it or not, most of what I've described that sat before us on tables or counters before it made its way to my mouth was familiar in some form. I knew about sugar cane juice and durian and even salted egg fish skins before leaving home. I had no idea that something called pandan even existed. We found out about it on our first day in Cambodia when we ordered some pandan sticky rice with mango. We love sticky rice with mango. Had to have this.
When our sticky rice arrived, it looked like the picture above. Rice? Check! Mango? Check!! Sauce made from something coconut-y? Check!!! What's the green stuff. Must be the pandan, right? Right!!!!
Pandan is basically Southeast Asia's version of vanilla. It's a bright green leaf used to flavor food. We found some when we were on a hike on Singapore's Pulau Ubin island looking for hornbills and other winged creatures. And it's just awesome. We stayed three nights in Cambodia. We ate pandan sticky rice four times in our stay at our hotel. We also found plenty of pandan treats in Malaysia and ate it pretty much every time we saw it. This was a revelation. And it's not strictly like vanilla. I'd describe it as a more herbaceous version of vanilla, for what that's worth.
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| More pandan treats? Yes, please!!! |
So after all that eating, there's one more thing to talk about: the best meal of our trip (for me, at least). And this is going to sound a bit crazy.
When we got to Kuala Lumpur, it was before check-in time at the Hilton so we dropped our bags and asked the hotel staff if there was someplace close we could get something to eat. They gave us a couple of options, one of which was something called NU Sentral, which sounded like it was some sort of hawker market-type thing that had a number of options. The directions were easy enough and it didn't involve walking outside in the heat so we picked that.
It turned out that we were sent to a shopping mall food court and it appeared that the air conditioning in the building stopped at the perimeter of the food court. Oh well. We were there and hungry, let's just pick something and this will be a throwaway meal. After looking at all the stalls, I picked a place labeled Chili Pan Mee. I just wanted to try something I'd never heard of. After trying to order just simple chili pan mee (whatever that was...) and not being able to convince the dude at the register that I didn't also want the side of dumplings, I acquiesced and just paid for what he wanted me to get (it was less than $3.50 US).
Usually when I get a meal that might be notable while traveling, I take a picture before eating. I didn't here. I took a picture of the stall (below) just so I could remember the name of the dish.
I don't know what they put in that bowl but it was phenomenal. I know there was pork and anchovies and probably some fish sauce and spices but this meal was just amazing. It was so rich with flavor and had the best sort of spicy heat to it. The broth was fantastic. The side of dumplings was good too but that chili pan mee...I mean just wow! At a mall food court for less than $3.50!!!! What are we doing wrong in this world over here that I can't get this stuff at our local mall? I feel embarrassed a bit here. We went to world-renowned hawker markets in Singapore and at least one Michelin-starred restaurant on this trip and I love something from the mall food court. It was that good.
So that's it. That's my Southeast Asia food rundown. I will say that I've tried to find a reasonably good chili pan mee in New York since I got back and I do very much like the version that Pig and Khao makes (they also have amazing coconut rice) but it's not the mall food court in KL. It's just not.
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