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I love a good night market when travelling abroad, but the Jonker Walk Night Market in Melaka takes the satisfaction factor up to the next level. Wow, this market is good. We spent quite a few hours snacking on its huge array of culinary offerings, returning the following night to savour some of the dishes we didn’t have room for the night before.
Melaka is a bit less than 150 kilometres south of the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, part-way between K.L. and Singapore. It is the home of Peranakan cooking, a delicious marriage of Chinese and Malay cooking styles and ingredients. But its cuisine also reflects other influences that have come to the Malay peninsula including Portuguese, Indian, Arabic, and many more.
Jalan Hang Jebat, formerly known as Jonker Street, is in the heart of Melaka’s Chinatown. Lined with Peranakan shophouses, many of which have been given colourful facelifts, it’s a popular place to shop, eat and enjoy a coffee.
Between 6pm and midnight on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights, traffic is blocked and the street is transformed into the Jonker Walk Night Market, a vibrant, bustling thoroughfare lined with pop-up stalls, with red paper lanterns strung overhead. Some of the stalls sell trinkets and souvenirs, but the vast majority sell street food. Most of the food is cooked on the spot and the range is simply amazing.
Most of the shops and cafés remain open, so there’s a lot to take in in the space of a few city blocks. There are stalls in some of the connecting streets too, such as Jalan Hang Kasturi, where we returned on the second night to eat freshly shucked oysters and fried carrot cake (not carrot cake as we know it; this is a fried-up mash of radish, garlic, egg and bean shoots).
We visited last weekend when the city was getting ready for Lunar New Year and the atmosphere was particularly festive. It was hard to know where to start, such are the choices on offer, so we launched right in at the first stall, King of BBQ, at the Melaka River end of Jonker Street.
King of BBQ was selling sticks of sausage for RM 5 each (about $1.80) but it was the barbecued quail eggs – or ‘quoil’ eggs as they described them – that appealed more. At RM 4 a stick, the eggs are cracked into a specially designed griddle with 5 eggs to a stick. When each egg is partially cooked, a small slice of sausage is placed on top and it’s cooked for a few more seconds. Yum! We chose barbecue sauce from a line-up that also included chilli, mayonnaise, tomato, and cheese.
When in Malaysia, you must try laksa. A decent-sized bowl here cost just RM 7. Bargain. It’s fun trying different laksas as each region has its own style – Melaka laksa tends to be creamier than Penang laksa because in Melaka they favour coconut milk whereas in Penang there’s a preference for sourer flavours.
This one came with a choice of vermicelli or egg noodles (we opted for both), tofu, bean sprouts, a couple of prawns and a handful of tiny little cockles. These were placed in a wire basket and quickly dipped in a steaming cauldron, then removed and put in a bowl with boiled egg, chopped makrut lime leaves and a small dollop of sambal belacan (chilli paste). Spoonfuls of spicy coconut broth were then poured over the lot.
There were no seats in this section of the market so we sat ourselves down on some nearby shop stairs as we didn’t want to be slurping and juggling the scalding-hot broth while standing.
There were so many other savoury dishes we could have tried but the laksa was so filling. A couple of stalls were selling fried carrot cake, half-shell oysters (RM 7 a piece) and half-shell scallops (RM 8 a piece). Several were grilling octopus then tossing it in a paste and zapping it with a torch to caramelize the flavours.
One stall was steaming eggs in bamboo, topped with prawns and shallots – this looked delicious. There was satay of course, grilled chicken wings, chicken rice balls, fried bananas, fish ball curry, quail egg curry, grilled corn – so many temptations. One stall was selling dried fish alongside an old photograph showing how the family had been doing it forever.
It was amazing to see the variety of gadgets and utensils used in cooking all this delicious food. One enormous round pan with burger-shaped impressions was used solely to cook crab burgers.
All this tasting made us very thirsty but thankfully there were a lot of great drinks to choose from: sugar cane juice, chilled chrysanthemum tea (seemed sweet at first but complemented the spicy food nicely), and a pink dragonfruit yoghurt drink were among those we tried. We passed on the Duck excrement flavoured tea.
One stall, Jcool, was doing mango smoothies with two pieces of imported champion mango (choose your own pieces) going into each cup. This stall is run by a group of (in their words) “self-dependence undergraduate students”. Like Jcool, many of the stalls had QR codes that you could pay with, although cash was welcome at every stall we purchased from.
Now for dessert. We started with Three-coloured Thai mango sticky rice which came with a generous serve of mango slices, a sachet of coconut milk, white sticky rice and two coloured sticky rices: green (pandan) and purple (butterfly pea flower).
The same stall was selling Musang king (durian) puffs. Musang king is a durian variety known for its rich, creamy bittersweet flesh. We didn’t try the puffs but we did buy a durian-flavoured egg tart from Madam Yap (RM 3). Compare that with the price of an egg tart in Oz.
Madam Yap had several stalls with an extensive array of food. The other sweet we bought here was putu piring, a fluffy steamed rice flour cake also known as kuih tutu. These are cooked in cone-shaped stainless-steel moulds lined with muslin. The rice flour mixture is placed in the mould first, followed by a dollop of gula melaka (palm sugar) and finally some coconut on top. A metal hood covers it while it cooks.
We could have bought durian icecream, chendol (a popular shaved ice dessert with pandan green noodles, syrup, fruit and coconut milk), Lotus biscuits, and Wife biscuits (whatever they are!) I regret not buying some gula melaka (palm sugar, boiled and solidified in bamboo poles) to bring home, but just like us, our suitcases were bursting at the seams.
It seems the locals really love their sweets. One stall was selling Coral seaweed jelly in a choice of flavours: passionfruit; osmanthus; red dates and longan; sakura cranberry; and rock sugar. These boasted ‘collagen, calcium, and fibre’.
Other stalls were selling traditional Nyonya kuih (colourful sweets made from coconut milk and rice flour). Several sold dodol (jellies made from agar agar) in flavours such as gula melaka, pandan and durian, while quite a few stalls sold sugar-coated haws (strawberries and grapes dipped in sugar syrup and presented on sticks).
One sweet that looked interesting was the Jonker Street Dragon Beard Candy (also known as Chinese cotton candy). Handmade from sugar syrup shaped into long, thin, wispy strands then rolled around flaked coconut, these sweets looked like a true work of art. Yet like almost everything in the Jonker Street Night Market, they were made swiftly and deftly on the spot.
Sundah makan? Have you eaten yet?
What? Jonker Street Night Market
Where? Jalan Hang Jebat (Jonker Street)
75200 Melaka, Malaysia
When? Every Friday, Saturday & Sunday night, 6pm till midnight
More information: www.tourismmelaka.com
At the time of writing, 1 Malaysian Ringgit is about 36 cents Australian.
We visited Melaka at our own expense and can highly recommend the cute boutique hotel we stayed in, Heeren Palm Suites, which we booked through Booking.com
Read more of our great market stories here.
