Drink this
A quick luo hon guo drink from Kedai Ubat Desa (48 Jalan Desa Bakti. 03 7984 6523) to chase away the heat. The large herbal tea dispensers are rare these days, but you can still find one here.
Budding entrepreneurs are sniffing out the cheap shop lots at Taman Danau Desa, filling the spaces with coffee machines and putting fried squids in our waffles (hello there, Jemi Café). The bombardment of new shops in that area has brought fortune to the less trendy neighbourhood of Taman Desa, ie Plaza Faber. The grimy commercial hub on Jalan Desa Jaya, teeming with medicinal halls and aquarium shops, is bristling with new life in ways you never quite expected – welcome to the heartland of yakiniku, yakitori and meringue on cocktails.
The neighbourhood isn’t crying out to be discovered – the old-timers living in the flats, whom you’ll find puttering around between kopitiams with an afternoon beer in hand, are happy with how things are. ‘Just don’t make the place jam,’ an uncle told us when asked about the new rash of apartment blocks and restaurants nearby.
Surrounded by gutted buildings with broken satellite dishes as the only adornments that survived, this part of Taman Desa isn’t pretty at all. But the weave of diverse cultures gives it character: An Indian uncle selling curry puffs outside a Chinese eatery; Thai workers who can speak basic Cantonese; a Malay auntie buying shampoo from a shop with screaming neon signs.
When the shops close at night, the centre of Plaza Faber roars to life – like a campfire – as the smell of grilled meat from Gerai Makan Japanese BBQ drifts down the corridors. If there’s a better way to eat, drink and be merry in the open right underneath an old flat, we’d love to hear about it.
