I’ve yet to smell durian, but I vividly remember the many signs forbidding them to be taken inside movie theaters, hotels, planes in Thailand.
Bit of a head scratcher, still… like, who takes a big ole durian to watch a movie? 
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When I was working in LA in 1988, we had an interesting issue with durian. One day, someone in the office thought there was a gas leak in the office, in the One Wilshire Bldg. We called office management who then called the fire department. They came and first told us there was no possibility of a gas leak as that building had no gas service in it. They used some kind of instrument to see where the odor or more accurately “stench” (it was no “smell” nor “aroma”…it was much too strong for those words) and traced it to a co-worker’s desk drawer…in which a box of a durian confection was. We threw the box away and with it went the stench. From that day on, there was a ban on any durian products in the office added to the ban on microwave popcorn (too many forgetful employees leaving in the microwave oven for too long led to that one!)
I saw durian for sale in Hong Kong in 2005, but didn’t try it. When in Bangkok last year, a ritzy gourmet supermarket in one of the chichi (ah, that’s how it’s spelled! 
) shopping malls was giving out samples, so I tried one. IMHO, it lived up to its reputation of being quite sweet and extremely fruity, but with an off-putting garlicky aftertaste. I’m glad I tried it, but am not interested in eating it again.
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That is a LOT to charge! I see cartons of oatmilk on sale in the supermarkets in KL, and they are no different in prices from dairy milk!
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You need to do at least one whole week of serious eating to do justice to KL’s food scene.
When I moved to KL from Singapore back in 2011, I was like a fish out of water. I didn’t know where to start. There are three Little Indias from what I could see: one downtown in Jalan Tun HS Lee area, one in Brickfields and one in Sentul. Each has its own good places - I go to Tasty Chapathi in Sentul for the best Punjabi food in town, whilst I’d trudge down to Mavalli Tiffin Rooms (a branch of the iconic Bangalore eatery) in Brickfields for the best South Indian breakfast in KL.
Newer, bigger restaurants no longer open in downtown KL - they proliferate in trendier dining precincts like Mont Kiara, Taman Tun Dr Ismail, Damansara, Bangsar, etc.
KL’s crumbling, old Chinatown is fast losing its Chinese character as most younger Chinese have moved from there to swish new suburbs like Sri Petaling and Puchong, where you find the big, new Chinese restaurants.
I remember posting on over 1,300 eating places in KL on Chowhound over 6 years - more as a convenient database that I can refer to. Totally shattered when they closed down CH.
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My sad coffee tale from this morning. My husband wanted to pick up some stuff from a pharmacy, so I decided to pick up a flat white from Zus coffee across the road from the pharmacy. What a mistake. They handed me what was essentially a bucket (16oz) of hot milk with a tiny bit of coffee in it. When I complained, they said it was the standard size. I asked them to make me a smaller one or give me a refund and they refused both. I just left the coffee on their counter as I wasn’t going to cart around a bucket of hot milk around. That’s RM 9.90 down the drain.
Back to 8055 where they at least had milk today and made a coffee that was miles better:
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And I’m not particularly well equipped to eat on a scale that would do justice to KL’s food scene. This morning I would have liked to go to Madras Lane to try curry laksa, but I just needed to have something light. After coffee, I tried to score some idli. But we were too late, the breakfast rush was over and restaurants were starting their lunch service. So I had a couple of chapati, dal and chickpea curry at Restoran Santa - RM 7 for this simple meal.
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Also a bit of a head scratcher - have people really tried to put their pets in the storage lockers at the National Art Gallery in KL?
There didn’t appear to be any overt restrictions on bringing a durian into the National Art Gallery. In fact, in one large mural, one of the key images was of a woman cutting up a durian:
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These coffee adventures are very entertaining to read. I suspect that many (or maybe it’s just me?) can identify with all the tradeoffs/considerations/evaluations you are willing to share in detail…
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DurianBB World (50, Jalan Sultan, City Centre, 50000 Kuala Lumpur)
So everywhere you look, a durian theme seems to crop up in KL. This was an iron-on patch in a stall at Central Market:
And we had never tried anything durian ever. So we dipped our toe into things Durian by ordering a durian flavoured ice cream at a really touristy place called DurianBB World.
London has M&M World and KL has Durian World.
The Durian ice cream wasn’t very strong in flavour, but I think was true to what @TokushimaCook described in having a garlicky aftertaste. If I had tasted it blind I would have guessed sweet garlic.
The segments in the chiller cabinet above are real but these segments below are fake food which people take photos with:
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Obviously I can’t comment knowledgeably on KL, but I have been so surprised by the amount of Bengali I have heard spoken in passing and I have spoken almost as much Bengali here as I do on trips to Kolkata! Literally every other person we have come across in Chinatown seems to be Bangladeshi. Even though our first language is English, my husband and I sometimes confer with each other in Bengali if we are trying to keep the conversation secret. In KL Chinatown, as soon as we started saying anything to each other in Bengali, nearby persons started looking at us with great interest (our accent is clearly not Bangladeshi) or the shopkeeper would join in with a remark.
On the way back to our hotel this evening we stopped into a small nasi kandar - masala dosa for husband, roti tisu for me, a helping of okra curry and a piece of chicken to take home. The roti tissue came with both condensed milk and a helping of fiery coconut/tomato chutney - whaaaat?!? The chutney went surprisingly well with the slightly sweet roti tisu.
We must have said a word or two in Bengali to each other because suddenly the waiter was really friendly and asking us where we’re from. He also whisked my roti tisu plate away to heap it with a serving of sambar dal - this was utterly confusing to me but he clearly meant well.
Each table had a bunch of bananas and a couple of small brown paper wrapped pyramidal packages. I thought these might be nasi lemak but wasn’t sure. I asked the friendly waiter in Bengali - he explained in Bengali that it was rice, with peanuts, a hardboiled egg, some sambal and some small dried fish, and helpfully offered that this is usually eaten for breakfast by the original people of this country! So I had identified it correctly and it was interesting to hear a Bangladeshi immigrant’s explanation of it!
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I’ve always been quite suspicious of the Zus coffee chain - it came out of nowhere back in 2019 and started opening nearly 100 new branches a year. No chain can ensure quality if it’s to grow that fast. I’d never stepped into one, ever. Your experience there has added to my negative impression of the brand.
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Reminds me of the experience recounted to me by a Bangladeshi friend in KL. She & her family are expats in KL - one time, her parents came from Dhaka to visit them. She brought them to Chinatown, as it was one of her favourite places to show guests in KL. Her father, a college professor from Dhaka University, looked around and said to her, “I just came from Bangladesh, and you brought me back to it?!”
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One of the strange KL-style ways of eating roti tisu. We can’t find that in Penang. Our roti tisu only comes with sambhar and coconut chutney.
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Isn’t roti tisu meant to be a sweet item/dessert? So why do they serve it with chutney and dal?
No, there is no hard-and-fast rule that it has to be served as a dessert - it was the very popular Kayu chain which popularised this dish, where the roti tisu is lightly coated with sweetened, condensed milk. It appeals more to the non-Indian, mostly Chinese, diners who made up 60%-70% of their client base. At Kayu’s main branch in PJ SS2, they sell 200 of these each evening! Other eateries soon joined in the fray with copycat sweet roti tisu.
But I guess not everyone goes for sweet roti tisu, so savory options are now offered.
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Interesting! Here, the roti itself seemed to be sprinkled lightly with granulated sugar, most of which had melted during the frying process. And they served the condensed milk on the side, along with spicy chutney and then sambar.
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Very resourceful - so, now they are covering all bases: the Chinese customers like their roti tisu sweet, whereas the Indian customers prefer theirs savory. You find these quirks happening all the time in Malaysia and Singapore.
For example, idiyappam - known in Malaysia/Singapore as putu mayong - is always served as a dessert commercially. No one serves their idiyappam with savory curries in restaurants or any eateries outside a home - but, at home, all Malaysian/Singaporean-Indians will have their idiyappam as a savory dish. Putu mayong is always sold with grated coconut and brown sugar - and all races: Chinese, Malays and Indians will expect to have it that way.
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I’ve been so very lucky to have very close Bangladeshi friends in Kuala Lumpur, so each time I’m in town, I get invited to their home for dinner. Nothing beats home-cooking. This spread was from a recent dinner a fortnight ago when I was in KL to attend the MICHELIN KL & Penang 2025 awards.
My loaded dinner plate:
Bhorta platter (clockwise from top-left): pumpkin, potato, egg, eggplant. Centre: hilsa tail.
Rui maccher jhol with veggies.
Chingri malaikari (prawn malaikari).
Bombay Duck bhuna.
Rui maccher dim-er bora (fish-roe fritters).
Dahl with raw/green papaya.
Okra with prawns.
A very special treat indeed.
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Wow 
!!!
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Ming Ren Xuan (L3-5, Level 3, Avenue K, 156, Jln Ampang, 50450 Kuala Lumpur)
Forgot to mention, we had booked Ming Ren Xuan for dim sum on Monday. It wasn’t busy at all early on a Monday. The restaurant is beautiful and the service was impeccable. We ordered from the dim sum menu, even though many things on the a la carte many looked amazing. We over ordered because so many things looked appealing.
Honey sesame BBQ iberico pork. Like delicious pork candy. Perfect mix of meaty and fatty, with the fat so meltingly soft that even I wasn’t bothered by it. Went well with the little plate of picked carrot and radish they put on our table.
Truffle har kau. These were wonderful. We pondered getting a second order but by the end we were so full we didn’t.
Wok-fried radish cakes. In retrospect, we shouldn’t have ordered this. Was too filling and not outstanding in the taste or presentation. Ended up taking most of this back to the hotel.
Deep fried carrot dumplings stuffed with minced meat. These looked so cute and tasted great. Served in a brown ‘soil’ that tasted like a chocolatey cheesecake base.
Crispy fragrant rice rolls filled with assorted seafood. Forgot to take a photo. Great combination of textures and looked really elegant. Would have preferred if the filling was just prawn. It was combined with what seemed like a proportion of fish paste, which detracted from the overall flavour, in our opinion.
Baked bamboo charcoal buns with BBQ pork. These looked very chic and had a subtle golden glitter on the top. Great texture of the bun and very flavorful filling. By now we were completely stuffed. I had these two buns packed to go.
Ee fu noodles with assorted seafood and black truffles. We were trying to decide between fried rice or noodles and decided on this one. The assorted seafood was braised fish fillets and prawns. There were also two different kinds of mushrooms, some whole tiny ones (? enoki) and some larger ones which had been sliced finely so that they were almost camouflauged within the noodles. The portion was fairly substantial, so I brought the leftovers back to the hotel.
My husband and I were both a bit perplexed by the fact that we seemed to get so full so quickly. The food was quite rich, so this might have contributed. Also, we didn’t have our teenage son with us, and we probably underestimated how much of a share he consumes when we go for dim sum.
The staff packaged our leftovers up very nicely in an MRX branded paper bag. They were actually very nice heated up the next day as snacks in our kitchenette.
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