Last year, I wrote a vegan food guide to Malacca in light of a week spent in this charming UNESCO World Heritage city. Malaysia is one of the easiest places in South East Asia to find vegan and vegetarian food, and I was thrilled to be back in Malacca this year to see what I had missed the first time around. As it turns out, I missed a lot! Below is a new and revised, more complete guide including restaurants and self-catering options. There are still a few places I failed to visit, so who knows, maybe there will be a take-three next year!

I felt I hit the vegan jackpot when I started researching restaurant options in KL. Unfortunately I was only supposed to stay a week, so I did some elimination and curated a list of the places that I thought sounded the best among the lot to make things easier. Even then, I was only able to visit a handful of restaurants, but since a few people have asked me if I was going to make a vegan food guide of KL, I thought I would share with you the list and hire the help of a few fellow bloggers to describe the places I unfortunately couldn’t visit. Those were in my mind the restaurants the most worthy of a visit, and I am dying to try all of them! Here they are, in no particular order.

Ashley’s is the more laid back sister of Living Food Bistro and Café, which I reviewed a few days ago. Located in KL’s trendy Bangsar neighborhood amongst lovely shops and cafes and a few minutes’ walk from the Bangsar Village 2 shopping mall, it has the unmistakable warmth of a passionate family-owned business. If Living Food felt like an oasis in the middle of the corporate world, Ashley’s is definitely its after hours, loosened-tie counterpart. Its cool interior, cool music, cool waiters (coincidentally my waiter was also Canadian!) and cool ambiance all lend themselves to lingering and feeling on holiday, even on a weekday.

I stumbled on Living Food Bistro & Cafe by accident as it is located in the same building as the Canadian Embassy in Menara Tan & Tan on Jalan Tun Razak in Kuala Lumpur. I immediately felt compelled to look at the menu – “living food” to me is food that hasn’t been killed by over cooking and that still brims with enzymes, nutrients and, well, life! That is how I ate back in Montreal when I had a kitchen and how I strive – but not always succeed – to eat on the road. I am so glad I got to sample some of the menu at Living Food and put a little mojo back in my diet, even just for one meal.

Kuala Lumpur is one of those places where, in the midst of a meat-eating nation, you barely have to scratch the surface to unveil an exciting health-minded paradise ripe for exploration. This week is all about #CleanEatingKL! A few days ago, I was able to visit Simple Life, a little chain of vegetarian restaurants who has healthy eating as its core value and is making Kuala Lumpur all the more exciting for me to explore.