Banned from hotels, taxis and the metro, and worth trying anyway — plus the other twenty fruits nobody warns you about.
Durian smells, at close range, like a combination of onions, gas and something that has gone wrong. This is not a hostile description; it is roughly what Malaysians say too, cheerfully, while eating it.
The taste is nothing like the smell: rich, custardy, sweet with a savoury edge, closer to a heavy dairy dessert than to fruit.
You should try it. You may hate it. Almost nobody is indifferent.
The varieties
There are dozens and the differences are real and heavily argued about.
Musang King — Mao Shan Wang — is the famous one and the most expensive. Deep yellow, bitter-sweet, dense. It commands prices that seem impossible for a fruit.
D24 — creamier, milder, cheaper, and what many people prefer.
Black Thorn, Red Prawn (Ang Heh), XO, Tekka. Each has partisans.
Prices are by weight and Musang King is many times the price of the ordinary varieties. Sellers will open a fruit in front of you and you pay for what you take.
The season
Roughly June to August, with a smaller second season around November to February, and both shift with the weather.
Outside the season you will find frozen and imported fruit, which is not the same thing.
Where to eat it
SS2 in Petaling Jaya is the pilgrimage: a street of durian stalls where people sit at plastic tables and eat by the kilo. It is about half an hour out of central KL by Grab.
Bukit Bintang and Jalan Alor have stalls, at tourist prices.
Chinatown and the wet markets, cheaper.
Buffet stalls offer all-you-can-eat during the season, which is a genuinely bad idea for a first attempt.
The rules
Durian is banned in hotels, on the LRT, MRT, monorail and KTM, in most taxis and Grabs, in many shopping malls, and on aircraft.
The bans are real and there are pictograms on the doors. The smell persists in an air-conditioned room for days.
Eat it where you buy it. The sellers provide gloves, water and a bin.
Do not drink alcohol with it. This is a widely held local belief and there is some pharmacological basis — durian contains sulphur compounds that appear to inhibit the enzyme that breaks down acetaldehyde. Whatever the mechanism, everybody here will tell you not to, and it is not worth testing.
The other fruit
Durian gets the attention and the rest of the Malaysian fruit shelf is extraordinary.
Mangosteen — the traditional counterpart to durian, cool and acidic where durian is rich. Purple shell, white segments. Same season.
Rambutan — hairy red shell, lychee-like inside.
Longan, langsat, duku, ciku, jackfruit, cempedak (durian’s mild cousin, usually fried in batter), starfruit, guava eaten with sour plum powder, soursop.
Pineapple, mango and papaya of a quality that makes the supermarket versions at home difficult afterwards.
Where to buy it
Wet markets — Chow Kit, Pudu, Imbi — in the morning, cheapest and best.
Roadside stalls everywhere.
Supermarkets for convenience at a premium.
Fruit is one of the genuine bargains in Kuala Lumpur, and a bag of mangosteens costs almost nothing.
More Food & Drink
Jalan Alor
A street of plastic stools and open kitchens that fills every night, priced for tourists and still worth going to.
The Mamak and the Kopitiam
Open all night, costs almost nothing, and is where the whole country actually eats. Learn to order and Kuala Lumpur opens up.