Author: tompepinsky

We had two friends visit us while we were in Malaysia last time, and each of them was a cat fan.  So, we took each of them to see our favorite sight in Malaysia.  This is a guy named Jamil Ismail who keeps a harem of trained cats that he rescued from the streets of KL.  He brings them out to a busy street in the touristy neighborhood of Bukit Bintang, where they sleep on a motorcycle that is not only running, but also blaring really loud music.  Cheesy, perhaps, but whatever.  It’s a little disturbing that we’ve been there so many times that he knows us, even enough to know that we speak Malay.

Anyway, Jamil is online now.  It seems that he updates his cat pictures about every single day.  This guy is no joke, he really like cats.  OK, maybe he’s a little crazy, but who cares?

The point of this is that we saw the motorcycle kitties last night when we were out for dinner with friends at one of our favorite restaurants in Kuala Lumpur.  It’s a Vietnamese restaurant called Sao Nam that has excellent dishes like mangosteen salad and duck with tamarind.  Last night we had (1) dragonfruit salad, (2) prawn and mangosteen salad, (3) duck with tamarind, (4) salmon with dill and fish sauce, (5) deep fried eggplant, (6) grilled chicken and herbs with rice noodles, (7) beef soup (pho), plus some desserts and a nice red wine.  The decor is “ironic Communist,” with all sorts of prints of political posters all over the walls.  We took pictures both of the cat and of the restaurant (start here, click Next >> to scroll through other new ones).

Around Malaysia, India, Singapore, Australia, and now San Francisco, you can sometimes happen across one of a chain of restaurants known as Annalakshmi.  These are tasty vegetarian restaurants that serve all-you-can-eat buffets as well as a wide range of drinks and breads at a price that can’t be beat: whatever you feel like paying.  If you check out the SF branch’s website, you can find out all about its principles of athithi dhevo bhava (The Guest is God) and the fact that it’s staffed only by volunteers.  What they don’t tell you is that it’s nice because it gives you Indian food off-the-beaten-path.  There are no standard veggie Indian dishes like regular dhal or vegetable samosas or whatever.  Instead, you get food that grandmothers cook, weird dishes without regular names or, oftentimes, identifiable ingredients.  But it’s all vegetarian, so you know you can’t get in too much trouble.

We went to the KL outlet last night for our dinner.  There is a woman who works there refilling the chafing dishes and stewpots who is very very nice, and who clearly has an interest in creating and nurturing vegetarians.  She always asks us "Do you take vegetarian food always?", to which we always answer "usually."  Last night she followed up with a new one: "Is it for compassionate reasons?"  Tough to figure out how to answer that, because in reality, it’s not.  But we nodded politely and helped ourselves to an unidentified mushroomy fried thing.  We think that in the grand scheme of things, it’s the ends that matter, not the means.