About BestByLocals
Built by locals and travellers in Kuala Lumpur.
We sell the research, not the meal.
We are BestByLocals, not BestByPopular.
BestByLocals makes self-guided food walks: private guides to the food in one neighbourhood, written so you can walk them on your own, at your own pace, over several days.
Each guide is put together by our team with local guides, food creators and food lovers who know the area. It aims to give you what you need to eat the way locals do: where to go, what to order, what it costs, when places open, where to find a toilet and, where we know them, the main ingredients in each dish.
Why we made it
Guided food tours are a good introduction, but they come with trade-offs. A self-guided walk takes most of them away.
- Eat at your own pace
- A tour packs a lot of food into a few hours. With a guide you keep for several days, you eat when you're hungry, not when the schedule says so.
- Less food wasted
- When there's more than you can finish in one sitting, food gets left behind. Here you order only what you want, when you want it.
- Split it across days
- Walk part of it today and the rest later. Each walk can be the lunch or dinner you'd have bought anyway, so you aren't paying for meals twice.
- Your time, your company
- No meeting point, no fixed start time, no waiting for the group, and no strangers you didn't choose to spend the afternoon with.
- Easy for families
- Skip a stop, slow down for children or grandparents, rest whenever you need to, and plan around allergies and preferences with the ingredient notes. Always check with the vendor too.
- Costs less
- You pay once for the guide, then only for the food you choose, at the vendors' own prices. That usually comes to less than a guided food tour.
- More than a tour can fit
- A tour has room for a handful of stops. A guide can take you to many more, spread across walks you do when it suits you.
What we promise
We don't take commission from vendors and we don't sell placements. You pay vendors directly, at their own prices; the prices in your guide come from their menus and price boards, and any that may have moved are marked as approximate.
We're not a tour operator, a booking service or a review site, and no vendor can pay to be included. We don't make halal, dietary or allergen claims: we note ingredients only where we know them, and ask you to check with each vendor.