Cafés in Malaysia Kuala Lumpur and Penang

Liberica, Johor's coffee

Leaf rust largely wiped out Malaysia's arabica in the late 19th century, and liberica replaced it; families have grown it for generations since.² The plants grow like trees rather than shrubs, which slows picking, and the cherries have a thick, tough pulp that makes the beans hard to roast.²

Johor grows most of it.² In June 2023 MARDI, the government's agricultural research institute, launched three new liberica clones, MKL 8, MKL 9 and MKL 10, at its station in Kluang, and the deputy minister named Kluang and Batu Pahat as suitable places to grow the species.⁴ Natural-processed liberica from My Liberica, a Johor café with its own farm, can taste winey with jackfruit notes; honey-processed, it leans toward hazelnut and chocolate.²

Kopitiams from Taiping to Johor Bahru

The kopitiam is largely a Hainanese institution. Hainanese migrants were among the last Chinese groups to arrive, in the late 1800s, when Hokkien, Cantonese and Teochew settlers already dominated trade, farming and mining, so many worked as cooks and staff in hotels, bakeries, households and British military canteens.⁵ Most kopitiams are still run by Hainanese families, handed from father to son, and by the 1960s they could be found in nearly every corner of Malaysia.⁵

Some of the early ones still trade: Restoran Yut Sun in Taiping, Perak (1921), White House Kopitiam in Kota Bharu (1935), Kluang Rail Coffee in Johor (1938) and Restoran Hua Mui in Johor Bahru (1946).⁵ The classic room had plain white marble tables and green floral porcelain, and the menu ran from toast and coconut jam to chicken chop with green peas and brown sauce.⁵

White coffee, from Ipoh to the sachet

White coffee comes from Ipoh, Perak's tin-mining town, where Hainanese settlers working the mines adapted the coffee the British drank to local tastes.⁶ It went national in a packet. OldTown, co-founded by Goh Ching Mun, whose family runs Ipoh's Nam Heong coffee shop, began making 3-in-1 instant white coffee in 1999 and opened its first OldTown White Coffee café in Ipoh in 2005.⁶ The chain reached 200 stores in Malaysia in 2013, and in 2017 Jacobs Douwe Egberts bought it for about RM1.47 billion and took it off Bursa Malaysia.⁶

ZUS, Kenangan and the chain boom

Malaysia's largest coffee chain is an app-first business. ZUS Coffee started in late 2019 as a kiosk built around delivery through its own app, overtook Starbucks in early 2024 as Malaysia's largest coffee chain, and by April 2025 ran 743 stores in the country against Starbucks' 320.⁷ It passed 1,000 stores across Southeast Asia in the last quarter of 2025.¹⁰

Competition came from Indonesia. Kopi Kenangan, which began as a small kiosk in Jakarta in 2017, opened its first Malaysian outlets in October 2022 as Kenangan Coffee; its best-known drink, the Kenangan Latte, is sweetened with gula aren, an organic brown palm sugar.⁹

Kuala Lumpur and Penang

The capital is where the chains started out. ZUS opened its first outlet in November 2019 in a kiosk of about 19 m² at Binjai 8, in the Kuala Lumpur City Centre district, and Kenangan's first Malaysian openings in October 2022 included one at Suria KLCC, the mall at the foot of the Petronas Towers.⁸⁹ The city's Hainanese coffee shops follow the older pattern, with the same marble tables, kaya toast and kopi sweetened with condensed milk found in kopitiams across the country.⁵

Penang's coffee shops keep an older layout. Most take the corner lot of a row of shophouses, and the owner's family used to live upstairs; outside the old family shops of George Town's inner city, the upper floor is now more often home to the shop's foreign workers.¹¹ Many never put the word kopitiam on the signboard and go by Kedai Kopi (coffee shop), Kedai Makan (eating shop) or simply Cafe.¹¹

The two specialty scenes share people. Joachim Leong, a co-founder of Ome by Spacebar Coffee in George Town, was a founding barista at VCR in Kuala Lumpur, where he and his partner met before opening Spacebar Coffee in Penang.¹²