Start the day in southern India. Warm upma is a savoury semolina porridge fragrant with mustard seeds and curry leaves, the sort of comforting breakfast found across Tamil Nadu. Alongside comes buttery kesari, enriched with ghee, and delicate kozhukattai, soft rice dumplings hiding sweet coconut and palm sugar. Tamil migration accelerated during British colonial rule, when labourers from southern India arrived to work in Malaya's mines and railways. Their descendants helped make dishes like these part of the country's everyday food landscape. Then cross culinary borders without leaving Ipoh. Attack crisp kaya toast lavishly spread with coconut jam and butter, dunking it into silky half-boiled eggs splashed with soya sauce and white pepper. Alongside comes an Ipoh heavyweight: kai see hor fun. Flat rice noodles slip through a beautifully clear chicken and prawn broth, with the city's famously soft limestone-filtered water often credited locally for their remarkable silkiness.

Next comes something considerably flakier. We'll make a brief stop for a warm egg tart, where crisp layers of pastry collapse around silky custard. Its family tree stretches from Portuguese custard tarts to Macau and the Cantonese bakeries of southern China and Hong Kong before versions of the pastry became fixtures of Chinese bakeries across Malaysia. Then prepare for a dramatic change of flavour. Nasi kandar has its roots among Indian Muslim food sellers in Penang, traditionally associated with vendors carrying rice and curries in baskets suspended from a shoulder pole – the kandar that gave the dish its name. Today restraint has largely left the building. Fluffy rice becomes the canvas for deeply aromatic chicken and fish curries, fiery sambal sotong and punchy prawns tossed with petai. Different gravies flood across the plate and mingle together into something considerably greater than the sum of their parts.

Between bites, pause at Paloh Khoo Miu Temple, one of Ipoh's historic Chinese temples, before continuing through streets shaped by the extraordinary wealth of the tin era. We'll cut through People's Park and into the old city, where shophouses, temples and colonial-era buildings provide clues to the merchants, miners and migrants who transformed Ipoh. Then Chinese influences return to the table. Beautifully poached Hainanese chicken arrives tender and glossy with fragrant soya and garlic, accompanied by one of the city's great culinary obsessions: Ipoh bean sprouts. Grown using the local water and prized for their unusually plump stems and crisp bite, they're treated here as considerably more than a side dish. Then follow the smoke to pork satay caramelising over charcoal. The skewers emerge sweet, savoury and charred around the edges before being plunged into rich peanut sauce.

There are 15+ tastings to conquer, but we're saving room for a final raid on Malaysia's sweet cupboard. Cool down with cendol: shaved ice drenched in coconut milk and dark palm sugar, threaded with slippery green rice-flour jams. Then comes rojak, which isn't quite dessert and isn't quite salad. Crisp fruit and vegetables disappear beneath a gloriously sticky, sweet-savoury shrimp-paste dressing – one of those combinations that sounds improbable until you've eaten it. Finally, slow things down with Teochew tau fu fa, delicate silken tofu pudding so soft it barely requires chewing. Four hours earlier, we started with a southern Indian breakfast in Little India. We'll finish in Old Town having eaten through 15+ tastings spanning Tamil, Indian Muslim, Cantonese, Hainanese, Teochew and wider Malaysian traditions.