Considering taking one of the food tours in KL? Great choice! Malaysia is renowned for its fabulous food and Kuala Lumpur food tours are a fantastic way to discover it.
You won’t just get to taste delicious food, but the best way to learn about the history and culture of Malaysia is through its food. If you haven’t done a Kuala Lumpur food tour before, this can sound strange. However, the food of Malaysia has been brought about by the history of the cultures in the area. And this is just as obvious in the food of Malaysia as in its people.
When you have a knowledgeable Kuala Lumpur food tour guide, there’s no better way to learn so much about KL than during a fun stroll around a great area of KL while tasting amazing food and drinks.
I know because I love taking Malaysian food tours. On my most recent visit to Kuala Lumpur, I took a fabulous Kuala Lumpur street food tour and I learned so much even though I have been to this city 10+ times before. It’s the best experience I have had here.
I figure the best way to show you how great a KL food tour can be is to share what one is like with you. I do this by detailing exactly what I ate and did on my food tour Kuala Lumpur experience.
Below, I share everything in this Kuala Lumpur food tour review so you can decide for yourself if you want to do a food tour in KL.
Spoiler: You’ll be booking food tours in Kuala Lumpur by the end of this article 🙂
If you already know you want to do a food tour, you can book one with Simply Enak right now at this link. Dive Into Malaysia readers save RM30 using the discount code: DIVE30
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Kuala Lumpur Food Tours With Simply Enak
There are a few options for taking food tours Kuala Lumpur. We recommend Simply Enak for your food. Simply Enak means simply delicious and that’s what these food tours are!
We have taken their food tours ourselves in both Kuala Lumpur and Penang and we are sure of their quality. Their guides are great, and you can learn and discover so much on these tours.
It’s not just me who thinks this either. They have a 5 star rating on TripAdvisor!
Simply Enak offers three food tours in Kuala Lumpur:
- Flavours of Malaysia – 4 hour tour starting at 9:30am or 3:30pm. Focused on local markets and understanding the ingredients in the different cuisines in Malaysia. Click here for all the details.
- Secrets Of KL – 4 hour tour starting at 4pm. Exploring Malaysia’s nightlife and modern (and trendy) Kuala Lumpur. For adults 21+ only. Click here for all the details.
- Kuala Lumpur Street Food – 3.5 hour tour starting at 9:15am. An overview of KL’s food, history and culture. This is also the one to pick if you are travelling with kids. Click here for all the details.
All tours will help you discover aspects of the history and culture of Kuala Lumpur while walking round an area of the city and tasting a crazy amount of food and drinks. The evening tour, Secrets of KL, also finishes the tour with a locally-inspired cocktail.
You can find all their food tours here.
If you are heading to Penang, you can also read my full review of their Penang food tour here.
Best Food Tour In Kuala Lumpur Review
On my most recent trip, I did the Kuala Lumpur Street Food tour. All my experiences here are based on this experience. I went on this tour with my husband and three kids aged 6, 11 and 12 at the time of the experience.
Disclaimer: We tried a lot of food on this tour. Like, a huge amount!
So there is a big chance that I’ll forget some of these in this Kuala Lumpur food tour review! But I’m sure it will still give you a great indication of what’s available and the experiences you can have.
My tour started at Pasar Seni LRT station. This is easy to find and get to and we were soon meeting our guide, Pauline. It was just our family on the tour so this was a big bonus.
We chatted and introduced ourselves and talked a little about the tour. Very quickly, we found ourselves at the first food stop. Yay!
We started at an Indian mamak local restaurant trying many types of bread and sauces as well as “indian donuts” and other foods.
It was quite a start with so much delicious-ness. Our family loves Indian food, but our kids hadn’t tried dosai or some of the breads before. We all found this fun. Even better is that our kids were being great at trying just about everything.
We also had drinks. My husband had the Malaysian national drink, teh tarik. Since I just had this on the Penang food tour, I tried a ginger tea (so good!). My kids chose iced milo.
Our guide showed right from the start that she was good at tailoring the food to the situation too with one of the rotis having chocolate and the kids receiving some Indian sweets when we were leaving for being so good with trying everything.
Actually, when we were leaving, an older woman in the restaurant also gave my 6 year old some sweets. I love Malaysians!
We headed towards the heart of Chinatown with plenty of stops on the way and plenty of information and time for questions.
The next stop was at a traditional Chinese tea stall where we tried three different types. Our guide was certainly not kidding when she said the bitterest one was really bitter!! 😀
On the way to the tea stop, we actually went into a KK Mart (like a 7-Eleven) and our guide showed us what the locals like to eat and drink day-to-day and about some of the different products, how there’s a push for less sugar in products and more. It was quite interesting.
She also bought us the Malaysian version of the Indonesian instant noodles we usually eat at home so we could try them later and taste the difference!
We walked on to where the last handmade char siew pao (steam buns) are being made in Kuala Lumpur. We were able to watch them being made, learn more about them and ask questions to the vendors.
Of course, we could also taste them. We could pick what we wanted, and they were made and steamed for us. We collected them at the end of the tour. So good!
Our next stop was an old bakery in modern, air-conditioned surrounds so that was nice. Many of the traditional vendors on this tour are in hot alley ways, so the occasional dose of air-conditioning is nice.
There were so many delights here – some for everyday consumption and some for special occasions. We tried a range of good including a special wedding biscuit. The pink one above. It was the best!
We then started walking through some more alleys in Chinatown coming across many traditional and delicious food vendors. It was very cool to watch everything being made and to meet the vendors. It made it more interesting for the kids as well.
We had a handmade curry puff after meeting the last lady still making them by hand which was particularly good. Our guide talked a lot about the different people left making these types of traditional dishes, and how it was dying out which is sad.
We also had some sweet potato balls.
Next up was our favourite dish from yet another vendor – coconut pancakes and peanut pancakes. The coconut pancakes were particularly good and my kids keep a look out now everywhere we go hoping to see them!
As we walked around Chinatown trying all this food, I did wonder how I had missed all of this before as I have been to Chinatown in KL a few times over the years. It’s just so invaluable to have a guide that could take us to exactly the right place for the right food from the right people.
In addition to the food that I am mentioning, we also went past far more and our guide would explain what things were and when they might be eaten.
We also had some fresh juices here and tried different ones we hadn’t had before. Because none of us had had guava fruit before, our guide also bought us cut up guava with dried sour plum powder on it – like locals would eat. It was great.
Of course, you can’t go on a food tour without learning about the infamous durian so we saw this next and learned more about it and all the different types.
We then visited a Chinese medicine clinic and store. It was interesting to me all the specialists they had working there. We learned more about this and our guide shared her own experiences with Chinese medicine.
We saw birds’ saliva worth thousands of ringgits that is used by the Chinese community. As I had just been to Sabah where this is collected, I found that particularly interesting. I definitely won’t be saving up for that 😀
After a walk through a wet market, we ended up at some great local Chinese street vendors where we had a fabulous laksa and “rat tail” noodles.
The noodles were some of the best I’ve ever had with minced pork and a yummy sauce. We were all getting pretty full at this point so it was hard to keep eating with my oldest and youngest kids throwing in the towel. My middle child wasn’t going to give up though, and he ate most the noodles!
We also tried some other dishes such as fish balls and fried tofu.
Nearly as good as eating the food was watching it being made. They were really pumping out the laksas (see the first photo above). There were newspaper clippings on displaying showing the praise they had received. It is very cool to sit basically in a car park on plastic tables and chairs eating such great food.
We then got our pau and headed to the final stop at a hotel with great views where we could go through everything we ate and did on the tour and see the path we took, check out the brand new Merdeka 118 and basically enjoy the afterglow of such a great morning.
Want Help Having An Awesome Food Experience in KL?
Join a Simply Enak (aka delicious) Food Tour!
There are three different options depending on whether you want to concentrate on street food, nightlife or off the beaten track places.
No matter what you pick, you’ll taste a range of fabulous local food and drinks while learning the history and culture of Kuala Lumpur.
There’s no better way to discover this great city.
Make sure you use the coupon code DIVE30 for RM30 off your tour.
Simply Enak Kuala Lumpur Food Tour Video Walk-Through: Kuala Lumpur Street Food
You can watch my experience on this one of the food tours Kuala Lumpur by clicking below….
Final Words
This Kuala Lumpur street food tour was fantastic.
From right at the beginning, when we sat down to a fabulous Indian breakfast to the noodles at the end, we tried a crazy amount of amazing food.
I loved how many street vendors we got to talk to and watch make their food. It definitely adds to the enjoyment of the food when you can see it up so close in such an intimate way.
It can feel a little stressful doing a tour with three kids but this worked well and our guide was great at catering things to us. She told me that she’d usually give more information but wanted to make sure the kids were ok, and what she did was perfect.
Exactly what you get to taste seems tailored to the people on the tour, and it all worked well for us. It definitely helps that my kids have been brought up with Malaysian food so it’s not completely foreign and two of them are good eaters. But even my fussier one had plenty that he loved and was able to try a lot as we just tried so many things.
I highly recommend doing a food tour. Kuala Lumpur is the perfect city for it. I just wish I had done one on my first trip and not my 15th! As now I have so many more dishes I love and want to eat more of!
Click here to read more about this food tour and to make a booking 🙂
Remember, you can get RM30 off this tour per adult using the code: DIVE30
Looking for other things to do in Kuala Lumpur? Find our full guide here. You can also find our full guide to Kuala Lumpur city tours here, our full guide to where to stay in Kuala Lumpur here and our full travel guide to Kuala Lumpur here. If you are heading to Penang, find our Penang food tour review here.
Planning a trip to Malaysia? Have any questions? Join our Malaysia Travel Planning Facebook group here now! It’s the perfect place to ask any questions and to be inspired!
