STORIES
The Many Flavours
That Make PJ, PJ.
Quick question – what's your go-to order?
Roti canai and teh tarik? Banana leaf rice or a plate of wantan mee, paired with cendol to cool off after?
In PJ, you don't have to choose. Chances are, all of them are on the same street, sometimes even the same row of shoplots.
That’s kind of the norm here. ‘Cos in PJ, different food traditions, different communities, and different influences have all found a place, often sitting side by side, sharing the same space, just about five feet away.
Take Jalan Gasing, for example. Walk down that one road, and you'll pass café 123 Gasing doing western brunch and coffee, Fellini serving up Italian food by actual Italians, Kanna Curry House going from roti canai to banana leaf rice, and 1977 New Ipoh Chicken Rice holding it down with classic chicken rice. Four different cuisines, four different communities, one road. Confirm plus chop, PJ got many places like this one.
123 Gasing
Restoran Kanna Curry House
Blue Dahlia
Sometimes it's not even four different shops – it's the same couple running two of them. Over in Section 17, Big Leaf BLR has been dishing out solid banana leaf rice on Jalan 17/12 for 5 years now. Just a few doors down, they also run Blue Dahlia, a quiet little café keeping traditional Peranakan cuisine alive: nyonya kuih, made from scratch the way your Ah Ma would approve.
Zoom out a little further, and you'll see the same thing happening at the level of an entire neighbourhood. Head over to Section 13, and old-school names like Coliseum Cafe and Hee Lai Ton are still there doing their thing, the kind of places where makan there feels like a small tradition passed down. But explore a bit further, and you'll bump into Godubab serving up Korean stews and newer cafés like Bookmark Coffee pulling in the latte art crowd on weekday mornings. Old kopitiam energy and new café culture, existing lorong by lorong. Nobody told them to blend in nicely like that – Section 13 just settled into it, the way PJ neighbourhoods tend to do.
If you want to see this entire philosophy compressed under one roof, you just have to look at PJ's food courts.
You can't talk about PJ food courts without bringing up Selera Jati Food Court in PJ Old Town, Section 1. Built right in the literal birthplace of Petaling Jaya, this place is as authentically PJ as it gets. It's raw, it's loud, it's bustling, and it's filled with a great variety of food. Walk down the aisles, and you'll see it: someone digging into spicy banana leaf rice, right next to someone else grabbing a plate of Malay nasi campur, while a few tables over, people are slurping Chinese wantan mee, spooning up hot yong tau foo, or cooling down with a bowl of cendol or ABC. That's the whole idea behind a kopitiam, really. Different people, same table.
Let’s put it this way: when there’s good food, we all enjoy it. Same-same.
Decades on, that same idea just got bigger. Mayang Oasis in Taman Mayang is basically PJ's entire identity, served on a plate. It's a massive, bustling food court with the fragrance of typical Malaysian food attached to it.
You'll find Chinese hawker noodles, Malay dishes, a western chicken chop a few stalls down, and even spicy Thai street food. Halal and non-halal sections are clearly marked, so everyone can eat together without anyone having to compromise. It's loud and unpretentious, just the way food courts should be. Families, office workers, groups of friends from completely different backgrounds all end up at the same long tables – eating completely different meals, but somehow having the exact same dinner conversation.
Mayang Oasis
And it's not just about the food itself – it's about where people gather around it. The Paddock is one of those well-known lepak spots in PJ, the kind of place where food comes with a side of everything else: MLBB tournaments, car meets, football viewing. It's less a restaurant and more a reason for the community to show up, hang around, and stay a while.
None of this was planned to look this way. A kopitiam that's been around for decades didn't set out to sit next to a nyonya kuih shop, which didn't set out to sit next to a modern café doing its own spin on local favourites. But that's what happened anyway – because that's what PJ does. It doesn't ask you to pick a side of the table, it welcomes you and lets you lepak, just the way you are.
So the next time someone asks what PJ tastes like, maybe the honest answer is: all of it, at once, on the same street. That's just PJ for you.
The Paddock
