by Dr Rahim Said
There are places in every city that outlive their original purpose and yet remain, lingering like ghosts of a time long gone, heavy with memory.
In Kuala Lumpur, that place was the Coliseum Café and Restaurant on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman. Or Batu Road during the days of old.
Established in 1921, it stood for a century as both landmark and time capsule, its creaky floors and colonial fixtures steeped in stories of empire, commerce, scandal and nostalgia.
And for me, it will forever be tied to the memory of a dear friend — the late Professor John English.
John was a Visiting Fulbright Professor of Journalism from the University of Georgia, USA, who arrived in Malaysia in the early 1980s with a Southern drawl, a mischievous sense of humour, and an almost inexplicable fondness for old, worn-out places. Most expatriates of his ilk would check into the Hilton or the Federal, where plumbing worked and no one had to step over sleeping staff in the hallways.
But John — true to his eccentric, sentimental nature — chose instead to stay at the boarding house above the Coliseum Café.
Now, this was no hotel by modern standards. It was a ramshackle collection of rooms with no attached bathrooms, where toilets and showers sat at the end of a long, dimly lit corridor.
On humid nights, it was not uncommon to find the café’s staff curled up and snoring in the passageways, fanning themselves with newspapers, indifferent to the occasional foreign academic stepping gingerly over them. John never complained. He loved it. “Adds character to the place,” he would grin, his voice molasses-thick and eyes twinkling.
What drew him most, however, was the café itself — a relic of British Malaya, once patronised by colonial officers, planters, tin miners and military men in their khakis.
The Western cuisine, long ago appropriated by Hainanese chefs from China, had over the decades evolved into its own distinct hybrid. Here, you could find a sizzling steak with black pepper sauce laced with hints of local spices, oxtail soup infused with star anise, and chicken chop served with a thick, sweetish gravy more reminiscent of kicap manis than Worcestershire.
John was enthralled by this culinary oddity — this fusion born not of modern food trends, but necessity and colonial compromise. “It’s what happens,” he once told me between sips of a tepid gin and tonic, “when empire collides with ingenuity.”
The menu read like a relic from Anthony Burgess’s Malayan Trilogy, where white men drank to forget the heat, and locals watched them with quiet amusement.
The walls hung with faded photographs of a long-departed era were witnesses to a hundred years of whispered deals, illicit romances, and drunken confessions.
Coliseum was, to John, a physical embodiment of Kuala Lumpur’s unpolished soul.
Not the gleaming KLCC skyline or the sterile malls, but the gritty, languorous city that existed in alleys and weathered shop lots, where history lingered not in museums but in everyday places.
For him, it was never about seeking out what was new and modern, but preserving a connection to stories that mattered, however inconvenient or unglamorous.
When the Coliseum Café finally shuttered in 2021 after a century of service, I mourned not only the loss of a building, but the passing of an era.
And I thought of John — how he would have taken the news with a wistful shrug and probably insisted we meet elsewhere for a drink, preferably somewhere dim, sticky, and unapologetically human.
Cities move on, as they must. But some corners of them stay in your heart forever, like old friends and fading photographs. And every time I pass that stretch of road, I remember a Southern professor with a crooked grin, a stubborn love for crumbling boarding houses, and his belief that the best stories are never found in the places everyone else wants to be.
Here’s to you, John. And to the Coliseum Café — the last, great anachronism of a vanished Malaya.
(The views of the writer are entirely his)
WE