This 9 Y/O cafe used to be a brothel, now it’s helping revive Chinatown’s M’sian heritage

Walking around Petaling Street in KL, you’d realise Instagrammable cafes are not difficult to find at all. There’s one tucked into almost every corner of the street, making tourists more than spoilt for choice.

But the area wasn’t always like this.

In fact, cafes were probably the last thing you’d see here 10 years ago. You’d instead discover the KL neighbourhood to be filled with wholesale businesses.

“Petaling Street had nothing, all the shops around [here] were doing wholesale. Even my own family’s business was doing wholesale,” Ken Ho, the co-founder of Merchant’s Lane, told us.

It’s a jarring picture when you compare that to Petaling Street now. So when did it all change and turn into a vibrant cafe scene?

Well, it likely started with Merchant’s Lane. According to Ken, “We were the first.”

The right place at the right time

At the time, having a cafe in the area was a new concept. People would do a double take when they noticed Merchant’s Lane because back when it first opened in 2015, your regular kopitiams were the norm there.

“That was the selling point,” Ken explained, adding how each unique touch added to the space helped bring in customers.

From an actual tree with its roots cascading down the cafe’s walls to smaller details like the rustic decor and rattan chairs that remind you of your kampung, all of these made Merchant’s Lane a hotspot.

“It’s like you’re trying to pass an exam, every item is one mark,” he jokingly said. You wouldn’t have even known that this place was once a brothel a few decades ago. 

Much of this change can be credited towards Ken and his three other business partners who together pooled about RM300,000 to renovate the space. This included heavy structural work and equipping the space with new pipes and wires.

Aesthetics alone isn’t enough to sustain a business, that’s true. But the period they first launched was also when visual-only social platforms started popping off. In Malaysia, that was none other than Instagram.

“Camera eats first” was the trend and social media competition was lesser as influencers were few and far between. “The [cafe] scene was a lot more straightforward back then,” he added.

So Ken and his team were quick to hop on the bandwagon and made Instagram their primary marketing channel. Seeing as how they’ve continued to sustain the cafe for nine years and counting, it seems to have paid off.

Food makes the world go round

Looks aside, good food and customer service have been another core value that keeps people coming back to Merchant’s Lane. It is still an F&B venture, after all.

Ken used to be the head chef at Merchant’s Lane despite having no formal culinary training. He’d watch YouTube videos and develop his cooking skills from there, blending the taste of Western and Asian flavours.

This role has now been relegated to others on his team. A lot of hotels had to lay off their staff members during the worst of the pandemic days, so Ken took in some of these capable chefs.

While he’s no longer as hands-on in the kitchen, he’s still very much involved in curating the menu.

Some of the cafe’s more unique fusion offerings are the Crab Kerabu Omelette, Nasi Lemak Pancake, Italian Chow Mien, and Mala Kuah Kacang Ramen. You can expect these to be priced at the usual KL cafe rates.

Every couple of months or years, they’ll either remove or add a new dish to Merchant’s Lane’s list of offerings. It’s a way to stay fresh and introduce more exciting flavours to patrons. 

However, Ken cautioned against doing it too frequently. “You can’t constantly change your menu unless you’re running a heavy chef-based restaurant,” which is what Fifty Tales in PJ practises.

It’s also okay to bring back fan favourites that you’ve previously taken out too. “People like to come back for things you can’t swap out. If there’s demand, sell it.” Ken recently did the same by bringing back a popular dish that he removed two years ago.

“When you put your heart in it…”

All that said, the Merchant’s Lane co-founder confided that regular customers don’t really exist nowadays, at least not in the cafe scene. “There’s always the next new shiny thing,” he stated.

The office lunch crowds were more stable and reliable in terms of foot traffic back then. Now, he finds that the younger generations are much harder to capture.

Hopping on trends can only get you so far, after all, without other strategies.

In favour of a more strategic approach, they’re keeping the cafe alive and relevant by spotlighting and celebrating what actually makes them unique—their story.

Any cafe can serve you a cup of good coffee and call it a day, but Merchant’s Lane and the Petaling Street area have a rich history. For example, did you know that the Chinatown you see today is thanks to revitalisation projects that only began a couple years ago? 

Ken has been reading up and collaborating with some of these projects to make Chinatown a vibrant hub again. 

“A lot of people actually don’t know the whole history, especially the younger generations. So I’m slowly trying to incorporate all that (historical and cultural elements) [to Merchant’s Lane’s branding].”

Ultimately, the key to the cafe’s continued success is simple: “When you put your heart in it and you work, it all falls into place.”

Featured Image Credit: Merchant’s Lane