Jalan Alor

This was my first Asian food market experience and it did not disappoint. There were crazy traffic as we came close to Jalan Alor, FYI. The choices were overwhelming at times but we ended up with the grilled seafood stand towards the end of the street. It’s a big food stand, taking over 3 – 4 actual stand spaces. My husband and I shared the grilled prawns and grilled stingray. Both were delicious!
The Chinese stand next to the grilled seafood stand we ate at was famous for BBQ chicken wings. We were too full to try it so maybe you can!

Two words, LATE NIGHT. This is the best place to go after a club or drinking on Changkat Bukit Bintang. The street is pretty long and a lot of vendors are pressuring you to sit down at their spot as you walk down and peruse. Go by feel and sit down where you see a lot of people eating. Most places on the left side have very similar menus. Beware, seafood is not cheap here. But the atmosphere is fun, and large groups are not a problem. So basically soak up the alcohol with some friends, and relax outdoors under the stars.

Jalan Alor is exactly what I imagined a night market would be — stalls selling a wide range of food and lots of eating on the street. The amount of food is extremely overwhelming! It was very hard to decide on food because there was so many restaurants but everything we had was tasty.
WAW Restaurant is located towards the other end of Jalan Alor if you are coming from the MRT station.
Recommendations:
chicken wings (supposedly the best in town), sticky, tender, very much like good BBQ wings
salted egg sotong, this is squid battered and fried, it is very unusual and gets tastier as you eat it
anything with lady fingers/​okra or belacan/​shrimp paste
lamb satay
calamani sour plum juice — tart and sweet, very refreshing and a local favorite
Fat Brother is a stall towards the middle and they sell all sorts of meat/​veggies on a stick, there is seating right next to the stall. The sticks are color coded by price so you can easily see how much each item cost.
Recommendations: frog, lamb
Sangkaya Coconut Ice cream serves their coconut ice cream with actual coconut meat in a coconut shell. You can’t get more coconutty then that!
TIPS:
Everyone will be trying to get you to eat at their stall, if you tell them you ate, they usually leave you alone.
Cash ONLY
Don’t get there before 18:00 as most stalls will not be set-​up yet.

Sheer food fun and spectacle, but it sure isn’t for everyone! Jalan Alor gives any unsuspecting tourist (or even local) a shock to the senses. There’s just so, so, so much food. One side is almost entirely Chinese food, heavily leaning towards seafood and hawker stall grub, while the other offers a bit more variety: Thai, Malay, Vietnamese, Indian and more. There’s so much to see and sample here, so you absolutely must! And it’s pretty much the only place that’ll serve you after a 3am club jaunt.

Such a vibrant and lively street. It’s a cross between an outdoor hawker center and line of outdoor restaurants. Nothing fancy, just good food and a lot of activity going on.
I’m not sure how much the food differs from one restaurant to the next as most were crowded, but just have to same them I suppose!
Great addition to any KL trip!

Jalan Alor has a life of its own. It is insanely lively and so crowded that those driving on this street could end up spending half their lives there trying to get to the end of it. The first time I went, I actually forgot I was still in KL because the environment is a little similar to the night market on Batu Ferringhi, Penang (But that could just be me). You can find all sorts of food on Jalan Alor. For instance, you’ve got your ice kacang, curry mee, laksa, dim sum, nasi lemak and so on (Basically all your authentic malaysian food is on one street). Unfortunately, even though it’s great having everything on this one street quite a bit of the time the food is quite average. However, I still love going there because it’s still a really place to go in a big group and overdose on all this food.

There is something about the chaos of Jalan Alor that draws me back time and time again. Colorful, messy and just a tad overwhelming, KL’s residential tourist hotspot, Jalan Alor is pretty much the go-​to place when it comes to hunting down street food in all its unabashed glory. From lok lok carts to ais kacang stalls, roadside hawker stalls dishing out steaming plates of char koaw teow and sizzling black pepper chicken, you’ll be hard-​pressed to not find any Malaysian specialties here. That being said, just because you can pretty much find about every single thing under the sun, that sure as hell doesn’t mean that the quality of the flavors are going to be amazing. In fact, a lot of the times, some of the dishes tend to be just a little below average, especially to the trained Malaysian palate. It’s still a good place to get together and binge on a plethora of different things while you contemplate picking up a bunch of pirated DVD’s for your next movie night