The historic exterior of the Coliseum Cafe. The restaurant had been serving customers since 1921.
News that the 99-year-old Coliseum Cafe is shutting down for good has caused dismay amongst Malaysian foodies and historians alike. This 2014 story by our Travel writer Chester Chin perfectly encapsulates just why it is such a huge loss to our country s heritage.
This story originally appeared in
StarLifestyle on 31 August 2014, and has been edited for brevity and clarity.
The sconce on the stained wall at the back of Coliseum Café’s dining area hasn’t lit up for a while now. But the lamp’s faulty nature isn’t reason enough to warrant a brand new replacement - not when the item in question is a relic that’s almost a century old.
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Remembering Mike Salinas
I freelanced for the late B.A.R. news editor Mike Salinas in the 1990s, sending him political and AIDS-related stories from Los Angeles. As a former mainstream journalist, I often argued with him when he included activist terms under my byline; he once inserted The Betrayer in a Bill Clinton photo caption. But we worked well together.
Salinas was also insightful. He called me an environmental reporter because I wrote about fundraisers in a you-are-there style. He was right. I imagined my reader as a homebound person with AIDS who had tickets for the event but was too sick to go. I imagined a partner or friend reading him my coverage so that a person living with AIDS could picture himself there. Mike got a chuckle over the fashion fundraisers. One time I thought Sandra Bernhard was wearing a mustard yellow shag-carpet jacket strutting down the runaway. Luckily, I was seated next to a gay guy from the Gap who said she was wearing gay fashion designer Is