Hawkers Delight Deli: Cheap Malaysian food in Vancouver

It is officially tax season and this means I have come face to face with the glaring number of $ I have spent on food in the last year. Now when I go out to eat lunch, I’m limiting myself to a budget of $15 🙃.

Hawkers Delight Deli popped up on my search and caught my eye as an affordable option. It’s more of a take-out place, but they have some dine-in seating available also. We stopped by here for lunch looking for some Malaysian flavours.

Hawkers Delight Deli
4127 Main St, Vancouver, BC V5V 3P6

The vibe

So again, it definitely is more of a take-out place but they do have some seating. They have a few bar seats facing the window/street view, and 3-4 tables inside. There is no washroom, just a small sink for you to wash your hands or get drinking water from.

Overall, the dining experience isn’t that awesome 😬. It’s kind of cramped and tables and chairs seem kind of old.

Food review

We ordered everything to share between 2 people. Prices are in CAD and rounded to the nearest dollar for simplicity.

Fried kuey teow ($14)

One of my favourite Malaysian dishes is the fried or char kuey teow. This is a stir fried rice noodle dish with egg, bean sprouts, prawns, fish cake, and green veggies. At Hawker Delight Deli, you can choose between chicken or Chinese sausage, as well as spicy or mild. I chose Chinese sausage and mild.

The portion here is pretty generous and had good flavours 👍 – I liked how this dish was on the sweeter side. The rice noodles were stir-fried well and there’s quite a lot of Chinese sausage, although I wish there was a bit more care with how the green veggies were chopped up.

Nasi lemak ($15)

My husband orders the nasi lemak, a rice and meat dish featuring coconut milk rice and a grilled chicken leg. It is paired with peanuts, a hard boiled egg, cucumber and a house sambal sauce.

Again, portions were generous with quite a bit of coconut rice (yum). Peanuts were roasted well, cucumbers were just cucumbers. The grilled chicken leg was decent – not dry – but I felt it lacked a bit of flavour. We’ve had better nasi lemak in other places like John 3:16 in Richmond.

Roti prata ($4)

Lastly, we shared a roti appetizer. This is an Indian style flatbread served with curry dipping sauce.

The roti here is kind of flat and not as flaky and crispy as we want it to be. The curry sauce was fine.

Final thoughts

Loewe’s rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

We had an affordable lunch at Hawkers Delight Deli. For the price you pay for, the quality and portion is worth it. Just don’t have too high expectations. Again, there are better Malaysian places elsewhere, however the people and the food are authentic.

Out of all the dishes, we both preferred the fried kuey teow the most.

We will possibly return for takeout only for simple weekday meals.

Sincerely, Loewe