In a quietly gentrifying Kuala Lumpur neighbourhood better known for car washes and roast duck, Psychotic Operator crashes the party with natty wines, surrealist charm, and just the right amount of artfully curated chaos.
By all conventional logic, wine bars shouldn’t exist in places like Taman Paramount. It’s not that the neighbourhood in Petaling Jaya, southwest of Kuala Lumpur’s choked heart, is unfriendly. It’s just… improbably normal. You come here for a car wash. Maybe to fix your radiator. Or perhaps some very good roast duck from that old school Chinese restaurant that hasn’t updated its signage since the ’70s.
And yet here it is — Psychotic Operator, a wine bar with the name of a garage punk band and what looks like the creative abode of a mildly deranged artist. Step inside and it’s part surrealist art gallery, part bottle-strewn lair, all lovingly unhinged.
Funky art pieces — painted by the owner, naturally — cover the walls in what could be described as if Salvador Dalí and Keith Haring got tipsy together. Wine fridges hum softly along one side, half-empty in a way that suggests popular demand rather than poor inventory. And then there are the empty bottles lined up on shelves like a tasting graveyard for the gloriously weird and rare.
And weird is what you get here. There’s no Burgundy or Bordeaux to be had. Nada for Napa. No fancy champagne either, unless someone smuggled in a stray bottle as a prank.
Instead, the wine list revels in the oddball and the experimental. Think Deliquente from South Australia’s Riverlands or their McClaren Vale besties Alpha Box & Dice, both who make off-centred wines for off-centred people.
Or an atypical pour from Chile’s Neyen, the old vine specialist from the Colchagua Valley that celebrates dirt and soul alongside plush fruit. There’s Ribera del Duero too; but not the silky-suited Ribera. This is Bodega Valdaya, its hippie, bearded cousin.
And the food? Oh, the food.
It’s as though someone took modern bistro cooking and gave it a Malaysian back-alley rough up. The Chicken Pate arrives lush and unctuous, and instead of toast, comes with crisp Chinese youtiao — because why shouldn’t you eat liver mousse with deep-fried dough batons? The Fish Crudo, made with locally dry-aged catch that’s dressed with crunchy radish and zesty kumquat and tarted up with grain mustard, is cheery and summery.
But the must-order? The Clay Pot Rice. Here the local favourite gets the luxe treatment with an unholy amount of mushrooms, salted fish, and — bless them — lard. Glorious, greasy lard. The kind you’ll fight every piece for.
Some weekends at Psychotic Operator are a fever dream of their own. Sometimes it’s a food pop-up. Sometimes its a supper club. Other times it’s back with another one of those block rockin’ beats.
In a city increasingly obsessed with being shiny and presentable, Psychotic Operator is a joyous reminder that real fun still lives in the cracks. You just have to drive down the wrong street in a more obscure neighbourhood to find it.
[Photo credits: Joel Lim Photography]
Psychotic Operator
Address 7, Jalan 20/13, Taman Paramount, 46300 Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia (Google Maps link)
Opening Hours 3pm to 11pm daily
Tel (60) 12-916 6713
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Instagram @psychoticoperator
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