Takeaway / Wikimedia Commons
– Always perfect for a light dinner and a girls' favorite, it's basically like pita bread with cheese, and you eat it with dhal.
2. Roti – Roti comes in many shapes and sizes, like roti cheese, plain roti, roti boom, roti banana and many more even I haven't tasted, but here's the deal: roti means bread in Malay, so keep in mind you're eating many carbs. Delicious carbs, nonetheless! Sweet, salty, spicy – try them all, and don't forget to ask for your condensed milk which goes with each.
3. Curry – Curry chicken or curry vegetables, it really doesn't matter as long as it's curry. You ought to try the real taste of curry of the genuine Indian cuisine, which can be found on every street corner in Malaysia.
4. Mee Hon Goreng – An alternative to classic noodles, rice noodles are much thinner and soak up the spices' taste more easily than the classic ones. They remind me of soup noodles from my home country; mixed with vegetables and soy sauce, they're my favorite lunch dish.
5. Fish Head Soup – As unattractive as it might sound, it's actually a tasty dish, especially when cooked with milk. Now the thing is some people will eat the fish head, while others will discard it – and I would advise you to do the latter one. In addition, this is usually not a spicy dish, so you don't have to watch out for heartburn.
6. Banana Fritters – Here's a good example for a local desert! What with all the bananas around, you will notice many of the deserts contain bananas, and banana fritters are just fried bananas that taste very special – might need an acquired taste.
7. Som Tam Papaya Salad – A very exciting dish, for those who enjoy papaya and spicy, all in one. It's actually quite high up in the spicy charts, so one has to be careful. Besides being spicy, it's also salty, the mixture coming from fish sauce and chili. Combined with the tardiness of the papaya, it all blends into a special flavor in the mouth of the taster.
8. Pari Panggang BBQ Stingray – If you're into trying out exciting seafood, this one is a good 'catch'. It's served with plenty of raw onions on the top, its texture is completely new to everything I've tasted before, and the sambal belachan spread, which is the well-known curry Malay spread, goes perfectly with it.
9. Ayam Goreng – Another common dish that you must have in order to be able to say you've eaten in Malaysia. You can get it in many different ways, but it's mainly a fried chicken, all crisp and crunchy.
10. Fake meat in all its shapes and sizes – Although you can find this sort of stuff in the western world as well, it is definitely not as progressed in its development as it is here. There are a large number of vegetarian restaurant, mostly Chinese, which only sell mock meat dishes which bear the name of dishes with meat, and are made to look exactly like them. Mutton curry, boiled fish, fried meat, you name it.
Trying all these dishes can be harsh on some people who are not used to Asian cuisine, which is normal; so when the going gets though, you might want to throw in a
Gaviscon tablet! But don't leave this beautiful country without trying them out, or you would be missing out on a lot.
