Tonight I had one of the best meals yet, in KL’s Jalan Alor street, a carnival-like night market of hawker stalls featured on Anthony Bourdain’s Malaysia episode. I met with Uncle Jack’s two nephews for a meal of authentic proportions! To eat Malay style, you can’t be afraid to get dirty – food stall dirty. I tried frog’s legs congi, fried oysters, fermented boiled egg and lok lok (which is a food stall version of fondue but with every possible vegetable, meat and seafood – including jellyfish! – you can find on a stick, boiled/fried and then dipped in chili, satay or sweet sauce). And all eaten on multi-coloured plastic lawn furniture in the middle of the street. So fun and so delicious!
Frog tastes like chicken, oysters taste divine, jellyfish taste like crunchy sugarless gummy bears and fermented black eggs taste like ammonia and sugar soaked egg yolk. What a feast for the senses!
And, I had durian! YES! DURIAN! Usually deemed the “stinky fruit” it has a very distinctive odour and in my opinion, is not at all as bad as its reputation. I can’t decide if it’s sweet, sour or bitter and maybe it’s actually everything all at once but durian isn’t just a fruit. It’s an experience. It’s smooth and sticky and fibrous and thick, a solid, liquid fruity piece of protein all in one little bundle of yellow buttery joy. I actually think that people just don’t know how to react to the myriad of flavours that comes at them when they eat durian (Andrew Zimmern from the Food Network’s Bizarre Foods couldn’t stomach durian and had to spit it out!). It doesn’t actually taste bad – it’s just very different from any other thing that I’ve ever eaten before! It doesn’t taste like a fruit nor a vegetable, and it’s thick and heavy enough to be eaten as a main meal (actually, TJ and J said that sometimes they eat durian with rice!). Maybe this is why it’s revered as “the king of fruits” in Southeast Asia. They even have all-you-can-eat durian buffets here!
So great! Great great great to get a local flavor for a new place. And now my hands and breath and probably my entire room smell of durian. They’ve actually banned durian from hotels because it is THAT pungent!
Thanks J, TJ and S for taking me out! So sweet and so so fun!
