Melaka: Three Empires, One Restaurant, and the Worst Barbecue Sauce in Asia

We stopped in Melaka for a single night on the Bangkok to Bali itinerary, travelling from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore with an overnight in the old city as an interlude. The narrow streets of the Jonker Walk area, lined with antique shops and street food vendors and the kind of tourist infrastructure that accumulates around UNESCO sites after the designation rather than before it, had a genuinely pleasant quality in the evening when the heat dropped and the night market opened and the architecture took on a different character in artificial light.

The group dinner at Nin’s regular restaurant produced what I will call the Andreas Incident. Andreas was Dutch, solid-natured, cheerful, and not particularly difficult to please in matters of food. He had ordered barbecue chicken, the largest dish on the menu, and had been waiting for it while the rest of the table received and began eating their food in the sequence that a kitchen with one chef and eleven covers produces. When his dish finally arrived he attacked it with the commitment of someone who has been hungry for forty minutes longer than is comfortable.

The reaction was immediate and vocal. The sauce on the chicken was not what Andreas understood barbecue sauce to be. It was smoky in the way that charcoal ash is smoky, which is to say intensely and specifically, rather than in the sweet-and-sharp way that Western barbecue sauce tends to register. He announced this. He tried it again in case the first assessment was wrong. He announced it again. He invited me to try it and verify, which I did. My verdict, that it was a little smoky, did not satisfy him. His verdict, that this was not barbecue sauce, was definitive and final and delivered at a volume that the other tables heard without quite catching the specific content.

The barbecue sauce of Melaka followed Andreas across the rest of the trip in the way that certain moments follow people once they have been witnessed by a group: photographs of barbecue sauces, text messages referencing barbecue sauces, the occasional unprompted mention of it months later. He took it with good grace, which is the correct response to becoming a group’s running joke for something as harmless as having strong opinions about condiments. The chicken itself, once he had accepted that the sauce was what it was, was apparently fine.

Karaoke at midnight, as the group’s established tradition dictated. Goodbye to Malaysia in three-part harmony, several keys below where the songs required. The ferry to Batam and then the crossing to Singapore in the morning.