The latest wave of Johor Bahru cafes – late-night, alfresco with camping chairs, downtempo pop like Lana del Rey on speakers – caught fire around 2024, away from downtown.
There are a few good reasons for it: These roadside cafes open late, downtown is anathema to the great outdoors, and the scene is, by and large, Malay and young.
The scene has its roots in the COVID-19 lockdowns, when Gen Z began posting shots of camping chairs overlooking calming vistas. JB’s spread-out geography and forgiving municipal hand have helped the scene thrive.
While the internet tried popularising the trend under hashtags such as #healingchair, and local youth used terms like “port lepak”, the most accurate name for what this scene actually is remains “roadside cafe”.
And even as the scene scales up into hybrids, many have retained the DNA of the camping chair. Whether operating out of a van or a container on a gravel patch, these are businesses built on the freedom of the road (and roadside).
We checked out nine of these to see if they’re worth your time – roughly ordered by scale and ending with the closest thing this scene has to a spectacle.
1. KOPI KAMPUNG KAK CER
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