I’ve never felt a pressing need to make a fashion statement with a pith helmet, but if I did, Kuala Lumpur’s Coliseum Café would be the place to do so. When you push aside the swinging doors from Jalan Tunku Abdul Rahman, a busy downtown street, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d stumbled onto the stage set for a glossy TV drama set in the waning days of the British Empire.
The bar area looks like the kind of place Ernest Hemingway would have hung out if he’d traveled this way instead of going to Paris and Havana. Dark, wooden paneling, a worn tiled floor, high-back brown leather chairs, small wooden tables, and framed black-and-white photos and cartoons on the walls. Beside the bar a set of wooden screen doors leads into the main dining area, with white tablecloth-covered tables, swishing ceiling fans, coat racks on the walls, and elderly Chinese waiters, slightly stooped in posture after a long career of dish-carrying. All that’s missing is a clientele of mustachioed British colonial officers and businessmen sweating in safari suits.
If this was a TV set, the producers would have gone over budget to give the place an authentically time-worn look, taking the shine off the woodwork and the floors, scratching the leather seating, and selecting a paint mix to give the walls a slightly blackened-by-cigar-smoke tinge. Fortunately, the century-old Coliseum Café needs no touch-ups because it is the real item. It was opened in 1921 by a group of business partners from the island of Hainan in southern China. After the Japanese occupation of the Malay Peninsula in World War II ended, it became a favorite hangout for rubber planters, tin mine owners and the British colonial brass who gathered in the bar for gin and tonics after a cricket match at the Royal Selangor Club. The café is duly famous for its charcoal-grilled sizzling steaks and Hainanese chicken chops, but the menu includes British comfort food, including fish and chips and bangers and mash; it may be the only restaurant in Southeast Asia where you can order mushy peas. “The food may not be Michelin-starred,” noted owner Cheam Tat Pang, “but a lot of people will share the memories they have of this place.” He’s right. I have no memory of what Stephanie and I ate there, but I vividly remember the place.
“Making Up Malaysia” is Chapter Ten of Postcards from the Borderlands, to be published by Open Books in November. You can pre-order here. Here’s what readers who had a sneak preview are saying about it:
Postcards from the Borderlands is a love letter to the world by an “accidental” travel writer. Fascinated by history and culture, David Mould captures men and women in everyday activities and conversations … After reading this book, readers may agree that crossing borders—real and imagined—helps to enrich our lives in ways we couldn’t anticipate.- Jean Andrews, award-winning video documentary producer and science writer.
Preview of “Making Up Malaysia”
Malaysia fits well into my not-too-scientific category of “cobbled together” countries. In 1948, the British formed a federation of traditional Muslim Malay kingdoms and its Straits Settlements colonies. In 1957, Malaya became independent; six years later, it added Singapore and two colonies in North Borneo and two letters to its name to become Malaysia. The ethnic Chinese population, who had come to work on plantations and in business, was largely excluded from political power. This led to a 10-year guerilla war, the so-called Malay Emergency, and a long struggle by Chinese and Indian groups for political and civil rights. Stephanie and I begin our journey in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, and attend a major Hindu festival. We head north to the tea plantations of the Cameron Highlands, and the colonial port city of Penang on the west coast. From Kota Bahru on the west coast, we take a boat to the idyllic Perhentian Islands, then travel south by train through the highlands to the port of Malacca, which for centuries controlled the sea lane to China and the Spice Islands. Back in Kuala Lumpur, I get disoriented in downtown malls and visit an urban farming cooperative. I travel north by bus to the conservative state of Kedah, the country’s rice bowl. Yet just across the border with Thailand, the bars and karaoke clubs offer temptation.
