My first day in Kuala Lumpur I had set aside with every intention of being a zombie, dead to the world, and in need of staring at the skyline from my Airbnb’s rooftop infinity pool for hours on end. I woke up feeling fairly refreshed and eager to conquer the day though, and so set about reading some of the Pinterest articles on the city I had saved, or pinned; I guess the appropriate term is pinned. (I’ve spent the past seven years ridiculing Pinterest, only to find that it is an amazing planning tool. More on that another time though). 

One of these articles was a fellow travel blogger’s reviews of a whole list of brunch places in Kuala Lumpur. Bless her. Brunch is my absolute favorite meal of the day. 

Ok I’ll tell you part of why Pinterest rocks. When you Google “best brunch places in such-and-such place”, you get a return of top-ranking sites such as TripAdvisor. TripAdvisor is great for reading large clusters of reviews, but it usually ranks best “brunch” based on the reviews of every place that claims to serve “brunch.” (Usually any place that’s open during brunch hours). It’s incredibly frustrating trying to sort through all the bar food and coffee shops to find a restaurant with actual brunch food. (I know this because I usually find myself craving a good, Western-style brunch when arriving in a new place).

Enter Pinterest, where little bloggers who don’t rank as high as the big ticket sites can thrive. They’re the ones writing the super specific articles like where to find all the actual brunch restaurants in Kuala Lumpur. They’re the ones dutifully creating pretty photos to represent their articles, and inputting them into the database of all things pretty and organized that is Pinterest. 

One place caught my fancy, Breakfast Thieves, mostly due to it being plastic-free, and the author touted it as her favorite brunch restaurant in the city. So I figured out the train routes, and off I went. 

The place was located in an old, industrial square, turned hip, little, artsy cafes and boutiques. There was even an old Airstream turned cafe just outside. 

I sat down at a little table next to the big, picture window looking out at the Airstream, and admired the swanky, modern atmosphere. Everything was bright and cheery. Millennials get a lot of bad rap for a lot of things, but our reinvention of the brunch atmosphere is something I am a big fan of, and that atmosphere is catching on worldwide. 

I was presented with a menu and found that all of the offerings were quirky fusions of brunch foods from all over the world. They had eggs, which are sometimes hard to find in Asian countries. They had plates of pastries and jams for a more European palate. And given that the restaurant was started in Australia (although by Malaysians) I’m sure a lot of it was very Aussie. (I’ve never been, so that’s just an educated guess). This was just my kind of place. 

I ordered something with eggs and fruit, the two things I always crave in the mornings. The eggs were served soft boiled, and the server brought out a whole array of eating utensils, including something I had never seen before. It was a long, metal stick with a small, cup shape on one end, and a metal ball that slid freely up and down. I eyed it nervously as she set all the other utensils down, wondering if I was expected to know what in the world to do with it. Fletch and I are fond of visiting kitchen stores back home, and I thought I knew what all the gadgets were. Oh the joys of unexpected new experiences… 

Luckily it was her job to use it for me. One at a time, she placed the cup on the end of an egg, then slid the ball up the pole and let gravity drop it back down onto the cup again. Ahh, it was an egg cracker. What a delightful contraption! She let the ball slide down three or four times onto each egg before it was sufficiently cracked, and then proceeded to use a butter knife to pry the perfect circular cut off the top. 

The meal was something I would happily eat every day. I found the most delightful cacophony of flavors bursting in my mouth. The herbed cheesy bread was cut into narrow slices, the perfect width for dipping into the gooey eggs. The coconut black rice and red bean pudding was both fruity and herbal at the same time, which toned down the sweet for a more savory twist. And the yogurt had no sweet to it at all, which is just the way I like my yogurt to be. 

I suspected the meal was a pricy one, but I had nothing to compare it to as it was my first meal of the trip. At nearly 50 ringgit for a soy cappuccino and that delightful plate of food, I would later come to find out that yes, that was incredibly pricy for Malaysia. No matter though. The flavors were well worth every penny, and I would have gone back if there had been more time, and less drive to try as many new things as possible. 

If you are ever in Kuala Lumpur and craving a Western-style brunch and don’t mind forking over a Westernized sum of cash for it, then Breakfast Thieves is your place.