In England, going for a Chinese is a night out.
You decide on a Thursday. Somebody suggests it. There is a menu with numbers on it, a set meal for four, prawn crackers, and a bloke who knows your order. It happens in the evening, roughly once a month, and it is An Occasion.
What I had never once considered, in forty-odd years of doing this, is that Chinese food has a breakfast.
It is not a cuisine. It is just food.
That sounds obvious written down. It was not obvious to me standing in a Kuala Lumpur coffee shop at half seven in the morning watching people eat things I had only ever seen after nine at night.
There is a breakfast version of everything here. Chinese, Indian, Thai, Cantonese, Korean. Breakfast, lunch and dinner, all of it, every day, because to the people eating it, it is not “a Chinese.” It is Tuesday.
Britain puts you so far away from this that the thought never arrives. You cannot miss what you have never imagined. I had eaten Chinese food for decades and somehow never wondered what a Chinese family has on a weekday morning before work.
The answer, for the record, is often noodles. And they are very good.
Meanwhile, we are all just “Western”
The reverse is just as funny, and it took me longer to notice.
Malaysia does not distinguish between English, French and Italian food. It is all filed under one heading: Western. One word. The whole continent and half the New World, on one page of the menu.
Which is exactly what we do to them. We say “Asian food” and mean a landmass containing several billion people and about forty distinct culinary traditions. Fair’s fair.
What that produces is genuinely brilliant, and the emblem of it is chicken chop.
Chicken chop, and the spaghetti incident
Chicken chop is a proper piece of breadcrumbed chicken, restaurant standard, served with chips. If you squint it is a distant cousin of KFC, except better, and about a fifth of the price of anything similar at home.
I have also been served it on a bed of spaghetti.
Now. In Britain that combination would get somebody sacked. Out here it makes perfect sense, because chicken in breadcrumbs is Western, and spaghetti is Western, so obviously they go together. Why wouldn’t they.
And here is the thing I have to admit: it was lovely. Absolutely lovely. I have had it more than once and I would have it again tomorrow.
What you will not find, anywhere, at any price, is a Sunday roast with proper roast potatoes. That does not exist here. I have made my peace with it. Mostly.
The fusion that goes the other way
There are restaurants here where the kitchen cooks Chinese properly and Indian properly and puts both on the same menu. Not a compromise between the two. Both, done right, and you order across them.
You cannot really do that at home. At home you pick a restaurant and that decides what you are eating. Here the restaurant is just the building.
And then there is the fruit
This is the one that still gets me.
In Britain we have twenty kinds of apple and one banana. I had never questioned it. A banana is a banana. That is the shape and colour a banana is.
Here it is the other way round. A few apples, and about twenty bananas. Red ones. Miniature ones no longer than your thumb. Whole categories of banana I had no idea existed.
- Pineapple comes in several different types, and they do not taste the same
- Mangoes come in dozens of varieties and more than one colour
- Grapes range from about the size of a pea to genuinely the size of a plum. A bunch of the big ones is roughly a foot long and looks like a prop from a film.
- Corn that is multicoloured — individual kernels red, black, yellow and green on the same cob
We think fruit comes in one size and one colour because we only ever get shown one variety of it. That is not what fruit is. That is what a supermarket buyer decided fruit is.
What I would tell somebody arriving
Eat what everybody else is eating, at the time they are eating it. Have the breakfast. Order the thing you cannot identify. Buy the wrong-looking banana.
The food is the single best thing about living here, and it is not close. About ninety per cent of what I eat still makes me put the fork down for a second.
The other ten per cent is me trying to recreate a roast dinner without an oven, which is a different article and a sadder one.
