The Overview

Back in the day, Sek Yuen’s gramophone-serenaded dining room was the setting for Kuala Lumpur’s swankiest wedding banquets. These days, its kitchen—staffed by a coterie of cooks with more than 250 collective years of experience and fueled entirely by wood—draws boisterous multi-generational families and hipsters rediscovering the charms of the city’s old-fashioned joints. The menu, dominated by Cantonese classics, exists only in the heads of its owners, but you can’t go wrong with anything porcine: tender trotters stuffed with gingko nuts, lotus seeds and black mushrooms or slices of belly layered with yam, seasoned with fermented bean curd and then steamed. Another must is the “shark’s fin” (rest easy: it’s actually squid) stir-fried with egg and crab meat and eaten wrapped in lettuce with a drizzle of black vinegar. The whole sweet-and-sour fish, encased in barely there batter and resting in a pool of tart, lustrous crimson sauce, does justice to a hackneyed standard; roast duck, bronzed and imbued with wood smoke, is simply awe-inspiring. In the hands of Sek Yuen, even a dish as simple as baby gailan—singed in spots, napped in a light garlicky glaze—rises to dizzying heights.

Address:
313 Jln. Pudu,
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Telephone: +60 3 9222 9457