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MELAKA, MALAYSIA. Nearly everybody has passed through this Malasian port town at some point in history - the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Chinese from Hokkien and Canton, Tamils from the south of India.

They came for many different reasons - as missionaries, as traders, as plantation laborers.

I came to see how the version of Malaysian cuisine served in Minneapolis stacks up against the original.

All of the people who have come to Malaka have added to the local food scene.. You can find Dutch breakfasts and Portuguese seafood restaurants and south Indian curries and sweets, as well as native Malay dishes. But Malaka is also home to what might be the world's first fusion cuisine. When Chinese settlers intermarried with the native Malays, their descendents, known as Peranakans,  gave birth to a cuisine that combined traditional Chinese flavors with the Malay fondness for hot chilis and fried shallots and coconut milk and shrimp paste. The cuisine, also called Nonya, is pungent and spicy and aromatic - so aromatic that the smell of shrimp paste and shallots and hot pepper fills the air as you walk down the streets.

I first discovered Nyonya cuisine not in Malaysia but in Minneapolis. My first taste came at K-Wok on the West Bank - the menu is mostly Vietnamese and Chinese, but the owner's wife is Malaysian, and there are a few Malaysian dishes on the menu, including a pretty good curry laksa soup - shrimp and fish cake and noodles in a spicy, savory broth. There's an even bigger and better selection of Malaysian and Nyonya dishes at Peninsula Malaysian cuisine, including a version of curry laksa that I find completely addictive.

So l.Last night, wandering through the local Chinatown, when we came across a little storefront called the Best Cafe that advertised Nyonya cuisine and had curry laksa soup on the menu, I couldn't resist. It was delicious - pungent and lively and full of flavor. But when we got to the bottom of the bowl, my wife said, "You know, Peninsula's curry laksa is just as good." And she was right.