Sam Kee offers Claypot Ginger Wine Chicken, Fried Oysters, Steamed Fish, Grilled Fish and Fried Fish; Butter Saute Crab, Chili Crab and Kau Hiong Crab. Fabulous Food at fabulously inexpensive prices. Sam Kee is typical of what is called Hawker Food.

Locals eat here all the time.

A plate of chicken fried rice for example with a fiery sauce on the side is MR 6, or less than $2.

I’m still thinking in Rubles (Russian, not Belarussian) and just add a zero. So 600 rubles for a freshly made (three meters from the table) dish that happily feeds two is a bargain in any language.

When it rains, as it does almost daily at this time of year in Kuala Lumpur with the monsoon season approaching, workers rush out and raise pole umbrella canopies over the diners.

Alors Street is about a kilometer of cheek-to-jowel hawker stalls on both sides of the street, those on the left side larger premises, with photo menus and those on the right smaller and a handful of seats promising such delights as “No Name Burgers”.

Round the corner, in Changkat Bukit Bintang, there are a tempting selection of air conditioned cosmopolitan establishments offering pub grub and fine dinging including a branch of local Irish pub chain Finnegan’s, the Ming Jia Shan Chinese whose chef has served up Peking Duck at the London Hakkasan, Pampas South American Grill and Bar and a host of others covering Japanese, Italian and Spanish cuisine.