叻沙 · LUCK-sah · an old Malay word for noodles, long before it meant this soup
A paste of chillies, shallots, galangal, turmeric, lemongrass, candlenuts and fermented shrimp, fried slowly until the red oil breaks free of it; a stock boiled from prawn shells; coconut milk stirred in at the end and never allowed to boil hard. Thick rice noodles go into the bowl with prawns, cockles, fishcake and fried beancurd, the orange gravy goes over them, and a fistful of shredded laksa leaf goes on top. In Katong the noodles are cut short so the whole bowl can be eaten with one spoon. Three countries cook it, and no two towns agree on what goes in it.
Ask for laksa in Singapore, Penang and Kuching and you will get three bowls that share almost nothing except noodles. All three are right.
Laksa is a family of noodle soups from the Malay world: rice or wheat noodles in a spiced gravy, with seafood or chicken on top and fresh herbs over everything. The word itself, as Chapter 2 explains, seems to have meant "noodles" in the region for at least six hundred years. What goes around the noodles has been changing ever since.
The family splits into two big branches. Curry laksa, also called laksa lemak (lemak means rich, or creamy with coconut), is built on a fried spice paste, a stock of prawns or chicken, and coconut milk. Asam laksa (asam means sour) has no coconut at all: it is a thin, sharp broth of flaked mackerel, tamarind and torch ginger flower, best known from Penang. Between them sit dozens of regional versions, some white, some spaghetti-based, some made from a paste of more than twenty spices.
In Singapore, "laksa" with no other word means curry laksa, and the reference version is Katong laksa, named after the old Peranakan and Eurasian seaside district in the east of the island. It is the bowl this site is built around. Its gravy is thickened and made faintly gritty with ground dried shrimp, its toppings are prawns, cockles and fishcake, and its thick rice noodles are cut into short lengths so that the bowl is eaten with a spoon alone, no chopsticks. Singapore's National Heritage Board added laksa to its inventory of intangible cultural heritage in 2019.
Every hawker is judged on the same three things, and regulars will tell you which one a given stall gets right.
Dried and fresh chillies, shallots, garlic, galangal, fresh turmeric, lemongrass, candlenuts, toasted belacan and coriander seed, ground to a paste and fried in plenty of oil for twenty minutes or more. Under-fried rempah tastes raw and harsh; burnt rempah tastes bitter. Everything else in the bowl rests on this step.
Stock boiled from fried prawn heads and shells goes onto the paste, then coconut milk at the end. Katong cooks add pounded dried shrimp, which thickens the gravy and gives it a faint, sandy grain. It should be rich but pourable, orange rather than red, with a little oil on the surface.
Thick rice vermicelli, blanched and cut; bean sprouts; prawns, cockles, sliced fishcake and tau pok, the spongy fried beancurd that soaks up gravy; sometimes a boiled egg. Shredded laksa leaf goes on last, with a spoonful of sambal for anyone who wants it hotter.
Cutting the noodles is the one thing every account of Katong laksa agrees on, and the one thing nobody agrees about. The Singapore food writer Leslie Tay credits Marine Parade Laksa, the stall on East Coast Road from which the Katong name spread, with being the first to pre-cut its bee hoon. A CNA report in 2024 told a different story: that the hawker known as Janggut cut them so that customers of his unlicensed street stall could finish quickly when enforcement officers appeared. Others credit Sungei Road Laksa, across the island. All three may be partly true. The result is a bowl you can drink like a soup, which is how most people eat it.
The National Museum of Singapore keeps a 1970s porcelain laksa bowl and spoon in its collection, with a note that laksa was traditionally eaten with only a spoon, and that early hawkers served it in small, locally made bowls.
It is worth being clear about what laksa is not. It is not Thai red curry with noodles in it: there is no fish sauce base, no palm sugar, no Thai basil, and the paste is built on candlenut, galangal, turmeric and shrimp rather than on shrimp paste and dried spices alone. It is not northern Thai khao soi, which uses egg noodles, crisp fried noodles on top and a curry-powder base. It overlaps with Kuala Lumpur's curry mee, which locals there often call curry laksa, but curry mee is built on yellow egg noodles and usually carries long beans and sometimes cubes of pig's blood. And it is not ramen: the stock matters, but the paste matters more.
The noodle is older than the community that made laksa famous. The gravy belongs to the Peranakan women who cooked it.
The usual story of laksa is one of marriage. From the fifteenth century, Chinese traders settled in the port towns of the Strait of Malacca, first in Melaka itself and later in Penang and Singapore, and married local women. Their descendants became the Peranakan, or Straits Chinese: the men called Baba, the women Nyonya. Their cooking, Nyonya food, put Chinese ingredients and habits together with the spice pastes, coconut milk and souring agents of the Malay kitchen. Singapore's National Heritage Board, National Geographic and most food historians place laksa there: a Chinese bowl of noodles and seafood, made in a Malay way.
That story is broadly right, but it leaves out the noodle. The word laksa was in use in the region before the Peranakan community took shape, and it seems to have meant the noodle, not the soup.
Nyonya cooking had a reputation, among Peranakan families themselves, for being laborious and exacting. A young Nyonya was judged on her rempah: how finely she pounded it in the stone mortar, the batu lesong, and how patiently she fried it. The paste for a laksa might take an hour of pounding before it went near the fire.
Laksa fitted that kitchen exactly. It needs a long, careful paste, a stock that wastes nothing (the shells and heads of the prawns), coconut milk pressed by hand from grated coconut, and herbs from the garden. It was cooked at home, for families and for gatherings and weddings, as well as sold in the street.
Nobody has settled the etymology of laksa, and you will read several theories presented as fact. These are the four that matter, from best supported to least.
Persian and Hindustani had a word for noodles in broth, lakhsha, with relatives across Asia and Europe: Russian lapsha, Yiddish lokshen. R. J. Wilkinson's Malay dictionary of 1908 lists laksa, "a native vermicelli", as a Persian loanword. The Oxford Companion to Food takes the same line, with Muslim traders carrying the word east.
A Majapahit-era inscription from Biluluk in east Java lists hanglaksa among local trades. The French historian Denys Lombard read it as "vermicelli maker". It is dated to 1391 or 1393, depending on the source, and it suggests that noodles called laksa were being made for sale in Java six centuries ago.
Malay really does have a laksa meaning "ten thousand", from Sanskrit, and you will often read that the soup is named for its many ingredients or strands. William Marsden's dictionary of 1812 gives only the number; Wilkinson treated the noodle and the number as two separate words that happen to sound the same.
The story goes that Chinese diners named it for the gritty texture of the ground dried shrimp. It is a good description of Katong laksa, but it cannot explain why the word meant plain noodles in Java in the 1390s, or in Dutch cookbooks of the 1900s. The modern Chinese spelling, 叻沙, is just a sound-alike.
Put together, the best reading is that laksa began as the name of a noodle known across the archipelago, perhaps brought by Persian and Indian Muslim traders, and that Peranakan cooks in the Straits ports built the coconut gravy, the prawn stock and the seafood toppings around it. Some Malay historians go further: Khir Johari, in The Food of Singapore Malays (2021), describes Katong laksa as a fairly modern Straits Chinese dish, possibly shaped by Johor's Malay laksa. Both pictures fit the evidence. Neither is proven.
Katong lies along the east coast of Singapore. East Coast Road was planned in 1828 but only built in 1902, and through the early twentieth century the district was a place of coconut plantations and seaside bungalows, home to wealthy Peranakan and Eurasian families. Joo Chiat, just inland, was largely coconut estate under the Peranakan landowner Chew Joo Chiat. In the 1950s and 60s the centre of Katong was the "Roxy area", around the Roxy, Odeon and Palace cinemas, and the sea came up nearly to the road. Land reclamation from the 1960s onwards pushed the shoreline out, and Marine Parade was built on the new ground.
It was here, on the five-foot ways of Joo Chiat and along East Coast Road "when it was still next to the sea", as Leslie Tay puts it, that a Hokkien hawker with a beard on his chin, known to everyone as Janggut, began selling Peranakan-style laksa from a pushcart in the 1940s. Chapter 3 follows what happened next.
Follow the Peranakan, the Malay cooks who adapted their dishes, and the trade routes of the archipelago, and you find laksa. Every stop made it its own.
The old Peranakan towns. Melaka keeps a Nyonya curry laksa of chicken and prawn; Penang made the sour asam laksa that is now its emblem.
Katong laksa with its cut noodles and dried-shrimp gravy, curry laksa at every hawker centre, claypot and charcoal laksa, and the Malay laksa Siglap.
Almost every state has a laksa: fish-based Laksa Utara in Kedah, Perlis and Perak; spaghetti laksa in Johor; the white, rolled laksam of Kelantan and Terengganu.
A paste of more than twenty spices, chicken and prawn, omelette strips and lime. Credited to a Teochew hawker in Kuching in the 1940s.
Laksa Betawi in Jakarta, laksa Bogor with fermented oncom, Banjar, Palembang and Medan versions. Some served with rice cakes rather than noodles.
Curry laksa became a staple in Australia, especially Darwin, which holds a laksa festival every October. London's Malaysian and Singaporean cooks serve it too.
An inscription, two old dictionaries, a Dutch cookbook, a bearded hawker, a landlord's revenge and a celebrity chef who lost.
The early dates are scholarly; the later ones were kept by hawkers and their families, by word of mouth, and argued over in newspapers. Where sources disagree, both dates are given, and where a claim rests on one source or on legend, it says so.
The Biluluk inscription, from the Majapahit kingdom of east Java, lists hanglaksa among the trades of a village. Denys Lombard read the word as "vermicelli maker". It is the earliest known trace of laksa as a word for food.
Chinese merchants marry into local families in the Malacca sultanate. Their descendants, the Peranakan, will build the coconut-gravy laksa over the following centuries.
William Marsden's Dictionary of the Malayan Language lists laksa only as a number: ten thousand. No food.
Sultan Abu Bakar of Johor travels in Europe, including Italy. Johor legend says he came home and had his cooks make laksa with spaghetti, and Laksa Johor still uses it. Malaysia's culture department repeats the story; no record from the time confirms it.
Cookbooks for the Dutch in Java include several laksa recipes. The definitive 1902 edition of J. M. J. Catenius-van der Meijden's Nieuw volledig Oost-Indisch kookboek has a "kerrie laksa" of chicken in coconut milk with chilli, candlenut, galangal, turmeric, lemongrass and roasted shrimp paste, served with fried prawns and sambal. It also uses "laksa" for the noodle itself.
R. J. Wilkinson's Malay dictionary separates laksa the number, from Sanskrit, and laksa "a native vermicelli", from Persian.
Ng Juat Swee, a Hokkien hawker nicknamed Janggut ("beard") for the hairs on a mole on his chin, sells Peranakan-style laksa in Katong with his brother Ng Chwee Seng, on East Coast Road and the five-foot ways of Joo Chiat.
A Teochew immigrant, Goh Lik Teck, is credited with first selling the Sarawak version on Carpenter Street. In the 1960s Tan Yong Him refines the paste and sells it in jars, the start of Sarawak's laksa-paste brands.
The Ng family's laksa moves into the coffee shop on the corner of Ceylon Road. Sources disagree on the year and on which brother ran it. It is the stall, Leslie Tay writes, that first pre-cut the noodles, followed a year or two later by Roxy Laksa outside the Roxy cinema. Between them they make "Katong laksa" a name.
Wong Yew Poh starts selling laksa outside an ice factory on Sungei Road, keeping the gravy hot over charcoal. The stall, now on Jalan Berseh and run by his family, still uses charcoal.
A bowl of Roxy laksa costs 50 cents, when a back-stalls cinema ticket costs $2. Schoolboys eat it before the films.
The Roxy cinema is sold and Roxy Laksa moves to the East Coast Lagoon Food Village. Street hawkers across Singapore are being moved into hawker centres.
His children and relatives carry on the recipe, and the name.
Rising rent pushes the Ng family out of 49 East Coast Road. A former stall assistant, named by Michelin as Lucy Lim and elsewhere as Nancy Lim, opens her own stall there and calls it 328, which sounds like "prosperous business" in Cantonese.
The landlord ends 328's lease and opens her own laksa stall at No. 49; 328 moves next door to No. 51. Janggut's relatives open at No. 57. At one point stalls at Nos. 45, 47, 49, 51 and 57 all claim to sell the original Katong laksa. The Straits Times runs the story; Violet Oon judges the bowls. Two of the stalls close.
Anthony Bourdain eats Sarawak laksa for breakfast at Choon Hui Cafe on No Reservations. He returns in 2015 for Parts Unknown and posts a picture captioned "Breakfast of the Gods". Kuching has not let anyone forget it.
Malaysia's tourism minister Ng Yen Yen, launching a food festival in September, says other countries cannot keep hijacking Malaysian food, and names laksa, chicken rice, chilli crab, nasi lemak and bak kut teh. She names no country. Singapore's food writers take it personally.
CNNGo's list of the world's fifty most delicious foods ranks Penang asam laksa seventh. Singapore-style laksa is further down the list.
In the Singtel Hawker Heroes Challenge at Newton Food Centre on 7 July, Ramsay cooks laksa against 328 Katong Laksa. The public vote goes to 328, 59.5 per cent to 40.5. He also loses chicken rice and wins chilli crab. The same year a reviewer of instant noodles, The Ramen Rater, names Prima Taste's Singapore laksa the best instant noodle in the world.
The first Michelin Guide Singapore gives Bib Gourmand listings to 328 Katong Laksa, Famous Sungei Road Trishaw Laksa and a claypot laksa stall at Alexandra Village. The lists change year to year; 328 drops off in 2018.
In March, Singapore's National Heritage Board adds laksa to its inventory of intangible cultural heritage. In October, Darwin holds its first International Laksa Festival; it becomes an annual month of laksa.
On 16 December, "Hawker Culture in Singapore" is inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Laksa is not named in it, but it is one of the dishes that the hawker centre exists for.
Malaysia gazettes ten dishes as national heritage food. Laksa, which its tourism minister had claimed fifteen years earlier, is not one of them.
More places can claim laksa than any other dish on this site. Java has the earliest word. Melaka and Penang have the oldest Peranakan communities, and Penang has the asam laksa that topped a world ranking. Malaysia has a laksa in almost every state. Singapore has Katong, a heritage listing, and the bowl that beat Gordon Ramsay. Indonesia has its own laksa family, and Thailand a close cousin.
The most honest answer is that laksa is the noodle soup of the whole Malay archipelago, finished in many kitchens, with the Peranakan of the Straits as the cooks who made its most famous versions. It is the one dish in this guide that is genuinely shared.
You need to see the paste darken and the oil come loose, and hear an East Coast Road queue argue about who was first. Six films, chosen for what they show.
The Singapore-born chef Elizabeth Haigh, author of Makan, makes Katong laksa at home from the rempah up, in English. The clearest full demonstration of the recipe in Chapter 5.
A short film from Singapore's CNA on the bearded Katong hawker whose laksa started it all, and the family that carries on his recipe.
A longer CNA documentary on the rival stalls of East Coast Road and the question nobody there can answer: which one has the original recipe? The story behind Chapter 7.
Ramsay visits 328 Katong Laksa to learn the dish before the 2013 Hawker Heroes Challenge. He lost the laksa round by nineteen points.
The other branch of the family: Penang's sour fish and tamarind laksa at the famous market stall in Air Itam, with no coconut in sight. Compare it with the bowls in Chapter 4.
A short visit to the Sarawak laksa shop that Anthony Bourdain filmed on two different shows. Omelette strips, chicken, prawns and lime, at breakfast.
More: Mark Wiens at the charcoal-fired Sungei Road Laksa · eight regional laksas cooked side by side · Pailin's Kitchen's home laksa lemak · Bourdain's full Parts Unknown: Borneo
Coconut or tamarind, rice noodles or spaghetti, red or white, in a bowl or on a plate. Laksa is a family held together by one word.
Malaysian food writers like to say that every state has its own laksa, and it is nearly true. What holds the family together is a noodle, a spiced broth or gravy made from fish, prawns or chicken, and a pile of fresh herbs and raw vegetables on top. What divides it is almost everything else. The first split is the broth.
The Singapore and Kuala Lumpur default. A fried rempah, prawn or chicken stock and coconut milk, with rice noodles or a mix of rice and yellow egg noodles. Toppings vary by stall: prawns, cockles, chicken, tau pok, fishcake, egg. Many stalls use a curry powder in the paste.
Curry laksa made the Peranakan way. Ground dried shrimp thickens the gravy, the toppings are cockles, prawns and fishcake, and the thick bee hoon is cut short for a spoon. No yellow noodles. The bowl on this site's hero.
No coconut at all. Mackerel is poached and flaked into a broth soured with tamarind or dried asam gelugur, perfumed with lemongrass, galangal and torch ginger flower. Topped with raw onion, cucumber, pineapple, mint and chilli, with a spoonful of thick black prawn paste, hae ko.
Built on a paste of more than twenty ingredients, with dry spices such as cumin, coriander, clove, nutmeg and cardamom alongside the chillies and galangal, cooked down for hours. Chicken and prawn stock, coconut milk and tamarind; thin vermicelli; shredded chicken, prawns, omelette strips, bean sprouts and a wedge of lime.
The pale branch of the family, from Kelantan and Terengganu. Fish and coconut milk are cooked into a thick, white gravy with little or no chilli, and served over wide rice sheets rolled and sliced into spirals, with raw herbs and vegetables, ulam, and sambal on the side.
A thick gravy of flaked fish, fish curry powder, coconut milk and toasted coconut paste, kerisik, poured over spaghetti on a plate, with cucumber, bean sprouts, onion, laksa leaf, calamansi and sambal belacan. Traditionally eaten with the hand, and made for Hari Raya and family gatherings.
The second way to divide the family is by place. Laksa changed as it moved, and Malaysians in particular will drive across a state for a particular town's version.
Katong laksa on East Coast Road; ordinary curry laksa, often with yellow noodles and chicken, almost everywhere else. Claypot laksa arrives bubbling in its pot, the gravy slow-cooked with chilli padi and belacan. Sungei Road still heats a lighter gravy over charcoal and tops it with nothing but cockles and fishcake. The Malay laksa Siglap, named after a village on the east coast, is close to Johor's.
The home of asam laksa, and of the CNN ranking that made it famous. Flaked mackerel, tamarind, torch ginger, round rice noodles and hae ko. Penang also has a creamier "Siamese laksa", made with coconut milk and a fried paste, a reminder that the border with Thailand is not far north.
Sardine or mackerel blended into the broth, soured with asam gelugur and scented with laksa leaf and torch ginger, over rice noodles with a boiled egg. Perlis sometimes uses catfish or eel. In Ipoh it may come under a lacy fried-egg "nest"; in Kuala Kangsar, with handmade wheat noodles.
The east coast's laksam: wide steamed rice sheets rolled up and sliced, under a thick white gravy of fish and coconut, with raw vegetables. Terengganu also has a white laksa with black-pepper heat and a red one with spices and kerisik. Across the border in southern Thailand, the same dish is called lasae.
Spaghetti under a thick fish-and-coconut gravy thickened with kerisik, eaten from a plate with the fingers, with a heap of raw vegetables and herbs. The story that Sultan Abu Bakar brought the idea back from Italy in the 1880s is beloved and unproven. A festive dish, made for Hari Raya and for guests.
Melaka's Nyonya laksa uses a chicken and shrimp broth, no fish, soured lightly with asam keping and thickened with candlenut, over thick or thin rice noodles with fish balls, tau pok, egg, chicken and prawns. In Kuala Lumpur, "curry laksa" and "curry mee" mean much the same: yellow egg noodles, tau pok, cockles, long beans, mint.
Borneo's laksa, eaten in the morning. The paste is the secret, and many cooks buy it ready-made from one of Kuching's family paste makers. Chicken, prawns, omelette strips and thin vermicelli in a tangy coconut broth, with sambal belacan and lime on the side.
Indonesia has its own branch. Jakarta's laksa Betawi is a coconut and dried-shrimp broth with turmeric and coriander over rice cakes, ketupat, with lemon basil. Laksa Bogor adds oncom, a fermented cake. Banjarmasin's uses snakehead fish and noodles shaped into balls; Palembang's laksan is slices of fishcake in coconut broth.
Thailand's khanom chin nam ya is fermented rice noodles under a curry of pounded fish, shrimp paste and coconut milk: a close relative, not a descendant. Australia took up curry laksa so completely that Darwin calls itself the laksa capital and holds a month-long festival; Melbourne's Laksa King has traded since 1998.
Katong-style curry laksa, with prawn-shell stock, a fried rempah, and every topping. Give it two hours the first time; most of that is standing at the stove stirring. The quantities scale with the number of bowls.
The rempah is the part worth making in bulk. Fried and cooled, it keeps about a week in the fridge and around three months frozen, and turns a weeknight laksa into a twenty-minute job. The gravy keeps two or three days in the fridge without the seafood; reheat it gently, without boiling. Store noodles, toppings and gravy separately, and don't keep cooked shellfish for more than a day.
Laksa is a lesson in what dissolves in what. The flavours live in fat, the savouriness comes from fermentation, and the whole dish depends on getting water out of a paste and keeping fat inside a gravy.
A rempah is mostly water: shallots, garlic, fresh chillies and lemongrass are wet vegetables. While there is water in the pan, the paste cannot get much hotter than 100 °C, so it steams rather than fries, and the sharp raw notes of shallot and garlic stay sharp. Stirring drives the water off. As it goes, the paste thickens and the oil, no longer dispersed in water, gathers at the edges and floats free: pecah minyak, "the oil breaks".
That moment matters because the temperature can now climb past 100 °C into the range where browning begins. Sugars in the shallots caramelise and the Maillard reaction between sugars and amino acids makes the deep, roasted flavours. Push on too far, much above 180 °C, and the paste starts to scorch and turn bitter.
Many of the flavours in a rempah do not dissolve in water. Capsaicin, the heat in chillies, is almost insoluble in water but dissolves readily in fat; so do the colour of the chillies and turmeric and many of the aroma compounds of lemongrass, galangal and garlic. Frying the paste in oil pulls them out of the plant cells into the fat, and when the stock goes in, the coloured oil carries them through the whole pot. That is why a good laksa has a slick of red oil on top, and why a lean one tastes thin.
Capsaicin also turns to vapour well below its boiling point, from around 115 °C. That is why frying a chilli paste makes everyone in the kitchen cough.
Coconut milk is an emulsion: tiny droplets of fat held in water by coconut proteins. Heat changes those proteins. Food scientists at Penn State found that heating coconut milk between 50 and 90 °C made its fat droplets clump together, with some merging above 80 °C, and that heated milk separated more readily. A rolling boil, with its constant agitation, makes it worse. The result is a gravy that looks curdled, with flecks of protein and pools of fat.
In some dishes, rendang among them, that split is the goal. In laksa it is not. Hawkers add the coconut milk late, keep it at a bare simmer and stir it, and 328 Katong Laksa's founder has said the coconut milk must never boil.
Belacan is made from tiny shrimp, salted, left to ferment, ground and pressed into blocks. Fermentation breaks the shrimp's proteins into free amino acids, glutamate prominent among them, which taste savoury. Toasting the block before use drives off some of the fishiness and adds roasted notes. Dried shrimp contribute more glutamate, and shellfish also carry nucleotides that amplify glutamate's effect when the two meet.
Leslie Tay records that as the cost of dried shrimp rose, some Katong stalls cut back on it, and that the "umami punch" of the gravy faded with it. It is the dried shrimp, more than anything, that makes Katong laksa taste like Katong laksa.
Blood cockles are filter feeders. They live in coastal mud and concentrate whatever is in the water around them, including viruses from sewage. Traditionally, hawkers shell them raw and dip them in hot gravy for a few seconds, so they stay plump and bloody. That is exactly how Singapore had a series of hepatitis A outbreaks. A 2011 review in the Annals of the Academy of Medicine, Singapore lists seven outbreaks linked to cockles between 1978 and 2002, and names laksa as one of the dishes to which raw shucked cockles are added. It warns that a brief scald will not inactivate the virus, which can survive boiling temperatures for several minutes.
There have been no shellfish-linked outbreaks in Singapore since 2002, and stalls are inspected. But the advice from the Singapore Food Agency is to boil bivalves until they open and then for three to five minutes more, and for pregnant women, young children, older people and anyone with a weakened immune system to avoid raw or undercooked shellfish. At home, cook them through or leave them out.
The four largest cockle-linked outbreaks:
Laksa leaf, Persicaria odorata, is not related to coriander or mint, but it smells a little like both. Its aroma is dominated by long-chain aldehydes, compounds also found in coriander leaf and citrus peel. One analysis of its essential oil found dodecanal at about 44 per cent and decanal at about 28 per cent; a Malaysian study of the closely related Persicaria minor, also sold as daun kesum, found the same two compounds dominant. That is why the leaf goes on raw, at the end: the aldehydes are volatile and fade with cooking.
Asam laksa replaces coconut fat with acid. Tamarind's sourness comes mainly from tartaric acid; asam gelugur, the dried slices of a garcinia fruit used in Penang and Kedah, has a different, sharper sourness of its own. Acid sharpens the fish, cuts its richness, and makes the sweet pineapple and the salty prawn paste on top taste brighter.
Laksa is cooked at home for weddings and sold in the street for lunch. On one stretch of East Coast Road, it has also been fought over for twenty-five years.
Singapore's heritage board describes laksa as something eaten in coffee shops, hawker centres and restaurants, and also at home, at family gatherings and at weddings. In Peranakan households it was a dish for occasions: a pot of gravy big enough for the whole family, the toppings laid out for everyone to build their own bowl. In the street it was the opposite, a quick bowl from a pushcart, eaten standing up with a spoon. Both versions are still alive.
It is also one of the dishes that crosses Singapore's communities. Chinese, Malay and Peranakan stalls sell it, and halal laksa, made without pork and with seafood or chicken, is easy to find. The Malay laksa Siglap and laksa Johor and the Peranakan Katong laksa sit on the same island, a few kilometres apart.
Curry laksa at every food centre, S$3 to S$7.50 a bowl, often with yellow noodles and chicken.
Katong laksa at the old coffee shops near Ceylon Road. Cut noodles, cockles, a spoon.
A big pot for a family gathering or a wedding, everyone assembling their own bowl.
Laksa served bubbling in its pot, the gravy slow-cooked with chilli padi and belacan.
Instant laksa noodles and jars of paste. Singapore's Prima Taste and Kuching's family brands export the flavour.
Darwin's October festival, Melbourne's laksa bars, London's Malaysian and Singaporean kitchens.
The fight over Katong laksa is about a name and a recipe that nobody owns. Janggut and his brother made Peranakan-style laksa famous in Katong. Their family ran Marine Parade Laksa at 49 East Coast Road for decades. In 1998, when the rent went up and the family left, a former assistant took over the space and opened 328. A year later the landlord took the space back and opened her own laksa stall in it, so 328 moved next door. Janggut's relatives opened again a few doors along. For a while, five stalls within a few doors of each other were selling Katong laksa, several with "original" on the sign.
The press covered it like a sporting season. Violet Oon, the Nyonya cook and food writer, judged the bowls. Two stalls closed. 328 grew fastest, with photographs of film stars on its walls, Gordon Ramsay's defeat in 2013 and, eventually, franchised outlets; some regulars say the bowls suffered for it. Janggut's family still sells laksa under his name. National Geographic, visiting in 2019, found that the feud had largely faded. On East Coast Road, nobody quite agrees.
In September 2009 Malaysia's tourism minister said that other countries were hijacking Malaysian food, and named laksa alongside chicken rice and chilli crab. Singapore heard it as an accusation, and Indonesia could have, though she named no country. Malaysian commentators pointed out that the minister's own government had not put Penang asam laksa on its national heritage list; when Malaysia gazetted ten heritage dishes in 2024, laksa was still not among them. Singapore, meanwhile, had put laksa on its own heritage inventory in 2019.
The honest position, and the one this site takes, is that laksa belongs to the whole Malay world, to the Peranakan cooks of the Straits who made its most famous version, and to every town that has its own. It is the least ownable dish on this site, which is part of why people keep trying.
Laksa travels further than most hawker dishes. Australia took to curry laksa early, and Darwin, with its long ties to Southeast Asia, calls itself the country's laksa capital. Its Parap market stalls have rival followings, and since 2019 the city has held an International Laksa Festival every October, with a Golden Bowl award, mystery judges and, at the 2024 edition, more than 180 laksa dishes, some of them laksa-flavoured ice cream. In London, Mandy Yin's Sambal Shiok began as a street-food stall in 2013 and became a laksa bar on Holloway Road.
Bourdain's caption did for Sarawak laksa what his 2008 visit to Tian Tian did for chicken rice. He had eaten it at Choon Hui Cafe in Kuching on No Reservations in 2005, came back for Parts Unknown in 2015, and the shop has had a queue ever since. He was also fond of Penang's asam laksa, and said on television that it was the one thing he always had to eat in Malaysia.
Every term used on this page, then the questions people ask most, then where to read more.
All three. The word was in use in Java by the 1390s; the coconut-gravy versions were shaped by the Peranakan of Melaka, Penang and Singapore; and Malaysia and Indonesia each have a laksa in almost every region. Singapore lists laksa as part of its intangible cultural heritage. No country can claim the whole family.
The noodles are cut short before they go into the bowl. Who started it, and why, is disputed: Marine Parade Laksa on East Coast Road, Janggut himself (so customers could eat quickly), or Sungei Road Laksa. Whatever the reason, it lets you eat noodles and gravy in the same mouthful.
Probably from a Persian word for noodles, lakhsha, which reached the Malay world through trade. It has nothing to do with the Malay number laksa, "ten thousand", which comes from Sanskrit, and the Chinese "spicy sand" story is a later folk etymology. Nobody has proven it either way.
Curry laksa has coconut milk, a fried spice paste and usually a prawn or chicken stock. Asam laksa has no coconut: it is a sour broth of fish and tamarind, topped with raw vegetables, fruit and herbs.
In Kuala Lumpur, more or less. Curry mee uses yellow egg noodles and often long beans and cockles. Singapore curry laksa uses thick rice noodles, sometimes mixed with yellow; Katong laksa uses only rice noodles, cut.
Nothing quite works. Mint and coriander together are the usual stand-in. Laksa leaf, sold as Vietnamese coriander or rau răm, is in many Asian grocers and grows easily in a pot.
Undercooked cockles have caused several hepatitis A outbreaks in Singapore, most recently in 2002. At home, buy them live, boil them until they open and then for three to five minutes more, and throw away any that stay shut. If you're pregnant or have a weakened immune system, avoid raw or undercooked shellfish.
It boiled hard after the coconut milk went in. Add the coconut late and keep it at a bare simmer. A little red oil floating on top is normal and good.
Yes, and many hawkers in Kuching do for Sarawak laksa. A good bought paste plus a real prawn-shell stock and fresh laksa leaf gets you most of the way. Fry the paste anyway, until the oil separates.
Yes. In the Singtel Hawker Heroes Challenge on 7 July 2013, the public voted for 328's laksa over Ramsay's by 59.5 per cent to 40.5.
Darwin, especially in October during its festival; Melbourne, where laksa bars have traded for decades; and London, where Malaysian and Singaporean cooks serve it. Look for laksa leaf on top and a gravy with some depth to it.