Restaurants that deliver are marked with a 🛵 emoji. All restaurants are dine-in unless marked with a 🚷. The ones that we’ve visited in person have a 🚶‍♀️. Restaurants that sell their veggie products to cook at home have a 🛒. Just like my post about Penang’s vegetarian restaurants, full-vegan and/or vegetarian restaurants are marked with 🥬 emoji. Likewise, I included some emojis for spiciness 🌶️, being Jonas or my favorite dish 🏆, and a novelty indicator ⚗️ to point out something that had superior flavors. Restaurants that also have a shop to cook vegetarian food at home feature a 🛒. The absolute cheapest place receives the 🤑 emoji award.

Know that if something says “chicken” or “mutton” in my recommendations, I’m talking about mock chicken or mock mutton. Don’t worry; it’s completely vegetarian. Jonas and I are vegetarians who eat eggs, dairy products, honey, garlic, and onion and we also drink alcohol. But for those who are vegan, Buddhist vegetarians (‘allium free’), or have intolerances, we tried our best to point out dishes with:

• Cheese 🧀
• Honey 🍯
• Butter 🧈
• Milk 🥛
• Egg 🥚
• Garlic and onion 🧄🧅

Disclaimer: Please note that we are not always 100% sure of the ingredients. For example, some chefs might put garlic or onion in our food because of the assumption that we’re not Buddhist vegetarians—which is correct. Some non-vegetarian restaurants create a handful of vegetarian dishes but also add a bit of fish sauce or anchovy kimchi on the side without checking the ingredients. Therefore, I don’t assume any liability for your experiences at our recommended restaurants. If you’re unsure, it helps to ask the chef or waiter to clarify what’s in a dish.

We’re western tourists stuck in Malaysia who aren’t great cooks, so we don’t know much about Chinese, Malay, and Indian cuisines. And we don’t claim we know what we’re talking about.

When we learned that there’s a vegetarian restaurant right in our building, we knew there was no incentive to leave Johor Bahru. Life Ricette is a modern vegetarian restaurant with delicious foods. We’ve never ordered their food through delivery because it’s just downstairs, but once we had food to take away for motocross in Johor Bahru. Though you can eat here as a group and order à la carte, we mostly ate the individual dishes. Besides Chinese and Malaysian staples, the owner Desmond – who speaks English – also cooks up some mighty Western foods and some fantastic fusion.

All food at Life Ricette is vegetarian or vegan. You should ask if a dish is vegan to make sure. There’s no garlic or onion in the food in line with the Buddhist vegetarian principles. Desmond also experiments a lot with new recipes, which we’re often one of the first people to try. There are seasonal dishes for Christmas, Chinese New Year, and other holidays including mooncakes 🥮 – with and without egg yolk – for the Mid-Autumn Festival. You can also ask him what’s new these days and he’ll be happy to serve you. Not even mentioning the great cakes, these are some of our favorite things on the menu:

• Oat noodle in three-cup sauce 🏆 (Iris) 📸
• Crispy mushroom butter curry 🏆 (Jonas) 📸🧈🥛
• Sambal rice cakes 🌶️🥚
• Zao cai
• Curry rendang baked rice 🧀
• Burger on a purple sweet potato bun 🥚
• Nasi lemak 🥚

The price range for two people eating two individual dishes and drinking two cups of water: RM 30 – 50. Cakes are about RM 15 each.

We love this restaurant for its unpretentious vibe, great flavors, and unbeatable prices. Kuai Le Zhai is mostly famous for its vegetarian buffet (aka ‘economy rice‘) and its products for sale. You can bring your own box to the buffet or get a plastic takeaway box. They’ll put in the amount of rice you want and give it to you to top it up with all their goodies. It’s unclear to me which dishes contain honey 🍯 and egg 🥚, though you might try to ask the boy child you’ll see running around if you don’t speak Chinese.

What we do at Kuai Le Zhai is dine-in and order two dishes and afterward, take some economy rice home to reheat the next day. Usually, we order two à la carte dishes, but sometimes we order two individual Char Kway Teow. When we order Char Kway Teow, they first ask us if we eat eggs 🥚 or not before they put that in. At first, we weren’t sure why they sent us the young boy to take our order, but he speaks good English and is quite service-oriented. These are some of our favorite things on the menu:

• Curry chicken 🏆🎥🌶️ (Iris + Jonas)
• Fried kway teow (🥚 optional)
• Butter abalone mushroom 📸🧈
• Curry mutton
• Thai chicken 🌶️
• Economy rice 📸

The price range for two people sharing two à la carte dishes with two portions of rice and two Chinese tea (iced): RM 30. If we include two takeaway boxes filled to the brim with economy rice delicacies we end up paying RM 46

This restaurant recently had a make-over, which makes it one of the best places for a celebratory dine-in. We also almost always walk out with some products from its shop to cook at home—mainly their Taiwanese vegan kimchi, frozen Taiwanese dumplings, frozen hericium erinaceus mushrooms, kung pao sauce, and black pepper sauce. Going to Xiang Ji is always a joyous occasion.

You can order à la carte dishes to share or individual dishes. On their Facebook page, they often post the menu of the day, which we translate.

• Satay 🏆🗒️ (Iris + Jonas) 📸
• Fried kueh tiao (🥚 optional, either scrambled in there or raw)
• Mongolian veg chicken rice 📸
• Black pepper chicken rice
• Fried chicken rice with XO sauce

The price range for two people getting two personal dishes and two glasses of ice water: RM 30 – 50

Noodleface was the first place we ordered from when we arrived in Johor Bahru from Pontian. Later, we found out they also have an express shop in City Square Mall, which we visited in person. They have different menus with little overlap. But we prefer the dishes from what I’m dubbing Noodleface HQ. It’s unapologetic vegetarian fast food and mmmh, it gives me food flashbacks. We’ve never gone to Noodleface HQ in person because it’s quite a long Grab ride.

These days, there’s really only one dish we order from Noodleface: the Curry Rendang Cuisine Rice 🏆 (Iris + Jonas) 🌶️📸. It has delicious hericium mushrooms, breaded mushrooms, tofu skin, and so much more. It’s wildly delicious. I used to order the White Mushroom Sauce Sizzling Grilled Mushroom Noodle, but that’s only available on Fridays and Saturdays and sells out quickly. I’ve tried other dishes, but I’m basically stuck on curry rendang with soy milk to drink. It comes with white rice with a small salad with lettuce, cucumber, corn, and a fried egg 🥚. I always ask for ramen noodles and we use extra rice to make egg fried rice the next day. Their motto is Slurp & Burp! and it’s accurate. They apparently also sell their mushroom steaks to prep at home.

The price for two curry rendang with rice and two bottles of soy milk is RM 32

This North Indian vegetarian place is an excellent locale to eat heavenly spicy food 🌶️. We loved the Punjabi saag, their dahl, and their parathas. It’s delicious to drink it with a mango lassi or a masala chai on the side. However, if you have intolerances, pay attention because they use paneer 🧀, ghee 🧈 and sell lassi 🥛 and also use garlic and onion 🧄🧅 in their cooking, in addition to selling sweets probably made with honey 🍯. You can ask if they have any dishes without any of these ingredients or if they can make it especially for you.

We usually spend RM 50 here for food and drinks for two people to make an absolute feast

Though we’ve never been here in person, we love Friends & Fig for their delivery meals. In particular, we love their Japanese tofu bowl 🏆🧄🧅 (Iris), their vegan winter bliss bowl 📸 🏆🧅 (Jonas), and their tempeh protein bowl 📸🥚. If we’re extra hungry, we also order the tempeh snack, which makes us so happy because we tried preparing tempeh ourselves. By the way, the Japanese tofu bowl contains furikake, but I messaged them about it and it’s basically just a seaweed spice that is vegan at their business. Also, some of these dishes mention parmesan cheese, but also mention vegan mayo. I asked them via Facebook and they answered within five minutes that their parmesan cheese is vegan and made of nutritional yeast.

Friends & Fig is not super cheap, but it’s tasty and healthy food that always makes us feel better during the stress of this pandemic. We usually spend RM 39 for our food, and RM 55 if we include a snack

Though we learned about this place very late, we love going to Fulin Xuan. The restaurant has a nice interior and a classy vibe. So far, we’ve only tried out their à la carte dishes with rice, but they also have individual meals. In the picture, you can see the ultra-tasty mock chicken with stir-fried shredded ginger 📸 and minced mock meat with fried oyster sauce and bean curd on a hot plate 📸🥚 that was like perfect comfort food. Neither of these dishes is spicy, but they also have very tasty spicy food, such as the diced mock chicken with spicy dried chilies 🌶️. We ate 80% of the chilies on the plate, but afterward, the owner still said “So you don’t like spicy?” which hurt our egos a little.

We usually spend RM 50 here for two dishes with two rice and two ice water

Vegemore is a fast-food vegetarian restaurant located on the first floor of KSL mall. It might take a while to find it, so it’s usually a good idea to visit while you’re shopping there anyway. We tried to go there twice; the first time it was closed, the second time we had success. The restaurant also sells vegetarian food products to cook at home, so we got our hands on some of the chicken drumsticks we love so much. I got the Laksa 📸, which adequately spicy, but not the same thing as I had in Penang. Jonas had fried meehoon 📸 and was very very happy. The plan was to share the char siew 📸 and chicken drumstick, but it landed on top of his meal, which is why his food looks so epic.

We spend RM 29 here for food and drinks for two people

Merry Land is a cute restaurant in Johor Bahru with the Buddhist principles for vegetarianism. You can order à la carte food and individual dishes. We ordered a mock mutton or mock chicken dish with shredded ginger (see the photo here) and a noodle dish (see the photo here), which were delicious.

We spend RM 24 here for food and drinks (Chinese tea, iced) for two people

We ordered from Pure Minded Vegetarian Cafe just once so far. This restaurant has an absolutely enormous menu online. We ordered the popia, vege crispy duck with rice, and the mushroom steak nasi lemak 📸🏆 (Iris), which perhaps with egg 🥚 in the mayo. It’s incredibly cheap and I’d order here again, though Jonas would replace his crispy duck with something more epic.

We spend RM 30 here for food for two people

This is one of our favorite restaurants in all of Johor Bahru. We’ve been visiting this restaurant since week one of our arrival. As is usual in Yemeni restaurants, you’ll find some vegetarian eats at Star Hadramout in addition to many meaty and fishy dishes. Our favorites are the shakshouka 📸🥚, bean with egg 🥚, cheese salad 📸🧀, olive salad, appetizer plate, garlic sauce 📸🥛, and the masterpiece: the mulowah bread 📸 (in small). Note that all these dishes except for the epic bread contain garlic and onion 🧄🧅.

We usually spend RM 32 – 45 here for food and drinks for two people. The upper limit is when we get fancy drinks instead of water

Routine by Soon has been a life-changing experience. Their hummus party (📸 main picture of the article) is truly the best dish any vegetarian can wish for. I think you can make it vegan by asking the staff to leave out the egg. I’m not sure if it contains garlic or onion 🧄🧅, but I think not. Hummus party is truly a feast for one person or two people if you share another dish. Another favorite dish is the avocado toast 📸🧅, to which we add a poached egg 🥚, which we alternate with the kampong eggs anyway 🥚.

Though ordering their food will lift your spirits immediately, it’s still nicer to eat at their restaurant in the mall. There are many nice plants and the staff is super attentive. If you have space, you can also order their delicious burnt cheesecake with oat crumble.

We usually spend RM 35 – 60 here for food and drinks for two people, depending on whether we get avocado toast or not. When ordering to our home, we spend about RM 53 for just the food

Near perfection. The egg shakshouka 🏆📸🌶️🥚🧄🧅 from Arabian Nights is the closest thing to Tunisian ojja, albeit not as tomato-y. The first time we ordered it, the egg was poached inside the sauce and the yolk was intact. It was glorious. Since then, it sometimes arrives with an intact yolk, while at other times the egg is scrambled in there. Both of us have a clear preference for the drippy egg yolk version of this dish. That’s why we order one egg shakshouka each, which we don’t always finish, but if there’s any dish that’s perfect for leftovers, it’s this. We also order a cheese naan 🧀 and a garlic naan 🧄 with the food to mop up the tasty sauce.

We usually spend RM 53 here for food for two people to get very full or have some leftovers for the next day

This is our favorite place for making a roti party at home. They also do delicious thosai. We usually order one roti telur bawang 📸🥚🧅, one tosai cheese 📸🧀, one roti cheese 📸🧀, and two roti pisang📸. Because it becomes harder to cut when it cools down, we chop them up before eating. There’s always a variety of unsolicited curries/gravies that come with the food. Some of these are spicy 🌶️. It’s always a surprise and honestly, I can’t be 100% sure that the gravies are vegetarian. That’s why I always ask Jonas to test the food. There have never been pieces of fish, shrimp, or meat in the gravies so we’ve grown comfortable eating this. My favorite part is finishing by eating the roti pisang (banana roti) for dessert.

We usually spend about RM 17 – 22 for four or five roti and thosai, and an unknown number of unsolicited curries/gravies

May the record reflect that we love Arab food. Zaituna is a great restaurant that does a very nice and crunchy falafel and the best garlic sauce in town. In the picture 📸, you can find their falafel with tahini, Greek salad 🧀, eggplant moutabal 🧄, garlic sauce 🧄🥛, and bread on their menu. We don’t know how the pickled vegetable (the pink stuff in the picture) also becomes part of our order, but Jonas loves it. It’s a little sad that they don’t do shakshouka!

We usually spend between RM 40 – 50 here for food for two people

Ordering from Stuff’d has been tricky; sometimes they run out of guacamole, sometimes their Foodpanda build-your-bowl results in a very sad bowl. That’s why we often took a Grab ride to City Square mall to pick it up ourselves and combine it with a regular shopping trip. But towards the end of 2020, they’ve gotten their ducks in a row and improved their online ordering experience.

We always order their quesadilla vege 📸🧀🧄🧅. Sometimes we want one each, while at other times we share it. It’s also a good place to get a very epic veggie daily bowl 📸. Then we put in healthy stuff like lentils, beetroot, and edamame, and then cover it all up with cilantro rice, soba noodles, and any sauce except habanero (🌶️) because that messed up my quesadilla once and was all I could taste. Stuff’d is peak comfort food.

We usually spend RM 28 – 33 here for food for two people

When we miss Europe, we order pizza. Jonas always orders the bed of mushroom pizza 📸🧀🧄🧅 with delicious crunchy almonds. Sometimes we get a really big one (14″) and share it, while at other times I get my own dish and Jonas orders the 11″ 📸 and gives me a slice to not overeat. My favorite pasta dishes are the creamy mushroom spaghetti 🥛🧄🧅 and the spicy roasted vege linguine 📸🌶️🧄🧅, which was vegan until I added parmesan cheese. The pizza often comes with one or two bags of parmesan cheese 🧀 and there are always one or two bags of dried chili flakes 🌶️ to spice up the food.

We usually spend between RM 33 – 49 here for food for two people depending on our appetite

We love this place, although we don’t always have a winning dish. We always order two mains with two flatbreads, share both, and hope it’s a balanced meal. In their vegetarian section, the must-eat from this restaurant is the delicious gobi Manchurian fry 🏆(Iris+Jonas)📸🌶️🧄🧅. At first, we didn’t know what this mock meat was. Turns out the mystery meat is cauliflower (i.e. ‘gobi’ in Hindi). I usually don’t get excited about cauliflower, but this food is incredible.

For bread, we often order the pudina paratha 📸 and the cheese garlic naan 📸🧀🧄. We change up the second main every time we order, but in the picture, you can find the malai kofta 📸🧄🧅, which balanced out the spicy very well. Though we can’t really claim the texture of the meatball (‘kofta’) got us very excited, which seemed to be made of some kind of rice cake. Note that we weren’t wowed by their mango lassi and buttermilk (which was full of chilies 🌶️).

We usually spend about RM 47 – 51 here for food for two people

We absolutely love the very complete meals of this place. They all come with a fried or scrambled egg 🥚, but I think you can ask them to leave it out when you order. At first, their vegetarian section only contained two dishes: the vegetarian braised pork rice and the vegetarian Japanese curry rice 🏆 (Jonas + Iris). But they’ve since expanded their selection to five. In the picture 📸, you’ll see the vegetarian satay sauce mushroom rice on the left and the vegetarian Thai lion’s mane mushroom rice on the right. We still have one meal to try, but we’re sure it’s also delicious and healthy with rice, a salad, a fried/scrambled egg, and the yummy veggie and sauce toppings. I don’t remember seeing any garlic and onion in their meals, but I’m not 100% certain.

We usually spend RM 28 here for food for two people

We often go to Hock Kee to drink coffee and write. The staff knows our order by now. Before we tried again, we knew they had two vegetarian dishes on the menu. But since we stayed in Johor Bahru for so long, we almost missed their menu change. Now, they have like six or seven vegetarian dishes in a very well-specified section. In the picture 📸, you can see the extremely wholesome vegetarian assorted mushroom braised noodle 🏆 (Iris) on the left and the vegetarian Chinese BBQ sauce chicken with rice 🏆 (Jonas) on the right. I’m not 100% certain, but I think both dishes are vegan and garlic and onion free.

We spend RM 33 here for food for two people

Flowers in the Window is exactly what it sounds like. A hipster café in the old town of Johor Bahru, this is a really nice place to visit, relax, and admire the outdoorsiness indoors. They have a vegan smoky cauliflower bowl with a bucket of chimichurri 📸 and a vegetarian loaded hummus bowl with cheese-crusted okra and feta 📸🧀. We already wanted to go to this shop when we saw this video by a local Johor Bahru YouTuber about it. She received the hummus bowl without garlic and onion, but we received that one with at least bits and pieces of raw onion 🧅. Perhaps they (correctly) assumed we wouldn’t have a problem with alliums, but it’s good to make sure if that’s a problem for you.

Pro-tip: they also have incredible cakes, so leave some space!

We usually spend RM 50 here for food for two people. A bottle of water is included for free

Arvieen Ria changes its menu a lot, so whenever we crave it we first have to hope they didn’t accidentally take out the vegetarian menu yet again. This is the restaurant that taught us the word saivam (சைவம்), which is Tamil for ‘vegetarian’. Fantastic! We always order two delicious things and then divide them over two plates. In the picture 📸, you can see one thosai, half a chapati, a portion of kambing saivam peratal 🧄🧅 and a portion of ayam saivam varuval 🧄🧅. Everything except for the flatbreads is a little spicy 🌶️ – as is expected – but very manageable. If you want spicier foods, order something like the ayam saivam sambal 🧄🧅. In the top-left corner 📸, you can see what we call “unsolicited gravy” that comes with the food every now and then without us specifically ordering it. It’s vegetarian and we like it.

We usually spend RM 40 here for food for two people to get very full

We sometimes feel that we eat too often the ‘fancy’ vegetarian and vegan foods in Malaysia. Malaysia is very rich in cheap food courts and hawker centers, but often it’s not easy to find a vegetarian meal there if you don’t speak Malay, Chinese, Tamil, or another language. At one local food court in our neighborhood, we asked for “Makanan sayur-sayuran?” and someone pointed at something on the menu which read “ikan”. I knew that meant fish.

Then we walked on to the food court that belongs to the Sky 88 condominium, where someone immediately showed us around the various stalls. When we tried to slow him down and asked about vegetarian food, he pointed out two stalls: one Chinese (‘Da Chao’) and one Indian (‘Indian Meal’). That’s where we now always go to eat either vegetarian char kway teow with egg 📸🥚🧄🧅 or a vegetarian tofu/egg gravy with chapati 📸🥚🧄🧅🌶️. One guy 📸 always helps us make sure we get what we want. The biggest benefit of eating vegetarian food here is that you can get a beer to drink, although the local soy milk is also very good!

We usually spend RM 18 here for food excluding drinks for two people. The beer costs RM 18 per 0.5-liter bottle. These are the stalls we go to:

We visited this kopitiam after watching Miao Hui’s video down below. After watching her wolf down some very saucy noodles, I knew we had to have it. On the last day before lockdown, we visited the city center of Johor Bahru one last time to get two dishes. Jonas ordered their vegetarian fried kuey teow 📸🥚 and I ordered the vegetarian fried noodle 📸🥚 from the video. Both dishes were very delicious and the lady that served us made sure we had an endless supply of spicy condiments after she saw us eat one pickled chili🌶️. We both had a glass of delicious soy milk, which was very sweet but you can ask them to make it less sweet.

Unfortunately, Toast & Coffee doesn’t deliver their vegetarian dishes at the time of writing. I hope they’ll change their Foodpanda menu to include their vegetarian meals because we can’t buy their food like this in lockdown.

For these two dishes and glasses of soy milk, we paid RM26