Breakfast, With a Side of Nostalgia, at KL’s Lorong Panggung

There’s a standard breakfast combo available at every kopitiam in Malaysia—two soft-boiled eggs, coffee, and thick toast slathered with butter and coconut jam. But at How Kow Kopitiam (何九), on Kuala Lumpur’s Lorong Panggung, your breakfast comes with a side of nostalgia as well—and a big fat dose of it, at that.

Lorong Panggung is a tiny back alley that seems stuck in time. The street is mere minutes from the manic activity of Petaling Street/ Chinatown, but it feels like a world apart. Here, the laid-back mood and worn beauty of vintage KL is everywhere.

Paint peels off the backs of colonial-era shoplots, their walls coated with several decades of grit. A few makeshift food stalls call the alley home, each of them selling low-cost Malaysian comfort foods like nasi lemak and chee cheong fun. These businesses sell no-frills food, just the way it was made decades ago. And there, outside of Ho Kow Kopitiam, old Chinese uncles still sit around reading newspapers over cups of coffee and tea.

It’s a scene that could make KL’s anti-gentrification brigade weep.

Ignore the sprawling modern murals by Julia Volchkova and Kenji Chai, and it would be easy to imagine that the rapid development of modern KL had somehow skipped over the neighborhood, sparing these shops from the high rents and remodeling crews.

Except it hasn’t. There’s a spanking new subway station just as you step off Lorong Panggung onto Jalan Panggung. Modern coffee shops, both the air-conditioned franchised versions of kopitiams and the ones serving overpriced avocado toast, are springing up and replacing places like Ho Kow’s. Rent is slowly pricing out other tenants in the neighbourhood too.

It’s a shame because kopitiams were the OG coffee shops of Malaysia. When Hainanese Chinese first arrived in colonial Malaya, they got funneled into the hospitality industry. Many became chefs for the Straits-born Chinese and British colonial families living in the city. But when their colonial masters left Malaya during the war, the then unemployed chefs reinvented themselves as restaurant or bakery owners.

Some opened kopitiams ( “kopi” is the local Malay word for “coffee;” and “ tiam” is the Hokkien word for “shop”), serving strange but delicious hybrids of British and local cuisines. The English breakfast of eggs and toast was the inspiration behind today’s iconic soft-boiled eggs (eaten wobbly with soy sauce and pepper) and toast (with a thick slab of butter and kaya coconut jam in between).

Chinese laborers quickly flocked to these spots and they soon became an alternative to the brothels, gambling halls, and opium dens where they had previously gone to let off some steam after work.

Over time, as the various races in KL started mixing, so did their home cooking. That includes the kopitiams.

“The kopitiam is not only a place for food but a gathering point for many communities, a central location where you get updates about which school Ah Meng got enrolled into, or how Aunty Lily's daughter is now married to Uncle Don's son,” said KY, a Kuala Lumpur-based food blogger. “All these were done over a newspaper and a bowl of your favorite noodle served piping hot and that tastes exactly how you remembered them as a kid.”

Sure, other races have their own eateries too, but somehow it’s the Chinese kopitiams that evoke this strongest sense of the “olden days” here, according to Nadge Ariffin, a local food historian.

“And that's probably the strongest reason for it holding a special place among Malaysians,” Nadge told VICE. “It’s this semi-conscious sense of nostalgia.”

But while Malaysians harbor strong feelings for the glory days of kopitiams, they seem indifferent or helpless against what the future appears to hold for these endangered joints.

Soon there will be none left. Younger generations are neither picking up the aprons to man the existing kopitiams or all that keen on becoming their future, loyal patrons like their parents were. And with rent skyrocketing in KL, it seems to make more economic sense to be selling RM10 espressos instead of RM2 kopi-os.

Still, there may be hope. We can see a few joints paying homage to the kopitiam popping up around KL. And while the original Chinese cooks are gone, their stalls remain, though now manned by foreign labor from Myanmar or Indonesia, or even robots.

The upside, KY says, is the more authentic tasting ones, continue doing thriving business despite all these odds.

“I certainly hope that will be the case decades from now,” KY said.

We teamed up with UBER and Canon because we know that even when the desire for foreign adventure is strong, it's so hard to break from the familiar back home. Rider data compiled by UBER found that young urbanites revisit the same places over and over again.

So what happens when you break out of this rut and head out for a photowalk? That's exactly what we were interested in finding out. Check out our stories behind some of the best, but least visited, spots in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.