On the second night, we went to a Malaysian place for dinner and I had “chilli kang kong”, one of my favourite dishes from back home in Singapore. It’s basically a stir-fried water spinach dish with sauces and spices. If its cooked with shrimp paste and lots red chillies, even greater. “Kang kong” is a name in Hokkien, a Singapore Chinese dialect. I also ordered a deep fried fish and my family had fried rice. It is a longstanding government policy that all foreigners who want to do business in China must have a local partner. Therefore many places that offer foreigner food may have a foreigner as a co-owner but the chefs doing the cooking are all local. For example, this Malaysian restaurant may or may not have a Malaysian co-owner, but I am pretty sure that the chefs working in the kitchen are all local Chinese. I think there is a difference between cooking from a recipe and cooking from a cultural background. And the difference was definitely quite large in this restaurant. It was far away from being authentically Malaysian.
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