O N T H E F O O D T R A I L
mee
(
stir-fried noodles with pork and
fish cakes),
roti babi
(
pork bread) and
chicken chop (fillet of chicken in bread
batter and gravy).
Mervyn Lee now runs the joint after
taking over from his father Jack — who
in turn took over from his father, Lee Tai
Yik, the restaurant’s founder. Tai Yik
arrived in Malaysia (then under British
rule) from Hainan, a province of China
well known for food, in the early 1920s
and settled in KL — at that time a tin
mining town — to work as a cook for
his colonial employers. When he opened
Yut Kee, he blended Hainanese cooking
styles with Western dishes to satisfy
the palate of his largely British clientele.
Everyone in Mervyn’s family
cooks, but the recipes are not
written anywhere — all the
better to safe-keep such
foodie hits. Instead, they
are stored in the muscle
memory of the hands
that make them, and
everyone in the family
can whip them up
instinctively.
From lunchtime until
well into the afternoon, Yut
Kee is a hive of activity, with
the staff working at full speed
managing a heavy traffic of guests,
both local and foreign. But Yut Kee at
5
pm is a different place. As it prepares
to close for the day, the regulars start
trickling in and gathering around a large
central table, each with his beverage
of choice. Eric, now in his seventies, is
one of them. He shows up, disappears
for a while, then returns wearing an
olive-green safari hat. Another is Mr.
Singh, a tall and rather formidable-
looking figure, wearing a
pagri
,
or the
traditional Indian turban.
A few others join in, and the brisk
exchanges in the local language are
punctuated by bursts of loud laughter.
It reverberates on the walls and fills the
air with a kind of pitch-perfect, happy
clamor. I don’t quite know what it is, but
it works. And right there is the essence
of what makes Malaysia’s food, in all its
variety and secret styles that seem to
just work, in one table.
Cebu Pacific flies to Kuala Lumpur
from Manila and Cebu.
Top to bottom:
the busy alleys of
Central Market;
serving roti babi at
Yut Kee; the gang’s
all here at the
famous kopitiam
