From Drain To Dinner: Malaysia’s History Of Eating Monitor Lizard

Biawak has long been eaten in parts of Malaysia, but a combination of claypot curries and hungry food vloggers has given the humble monitor lizard a rather unexpected second act.

If there’s one thing Malaysia has no shortage of, it’s things to eat. We’ve got noodles, rice, curries, seafood, grilled meats, fermented things, deep-fried things, and enough variations of all of the above to keep you busy for several lifetimes. And then you get further along down that list, like quite some distance down there, before you see biawak. Yeah, you know that giant lizard you occasionally see lumbering across the street or swimming rather menacingly through a drain? It turns out that people actually eat those things.

Biawak on the plate

Now, eating monitor lizard isn’t exactly something new here. Historically harvested in parts of rural and indigenous Malaysia, it’s been consumed as a source of food and, in some traditions, valued for its supposed medicinal properties. You’ll hear all sorts of claims about it being good for the skin, helping with respiratory problems, and giving you a bit more pep in your step or what have you, although those are more traditional beliefs rather than things I’d go around taking as any sort of medical advice.

As for what it actually tastes like, the general consensus seems to be that it tastes like a leaner, bonier chicken. Boring answer, I know, but the fact of the matter is that a lot of meats just tend to be bland like that, and so invite that same comparison. Because of its more subtle characteristics, it’s a meat that takes nicely to stronger seasonings, which is just as well given what tends to happen to it next.

Into the claypot

Previously enjoyed by the more rural-dwelling populace, monitor lizard has now found its way onto the menus of several satti sorru stalls around the Klang Valley in recent years. It’s here that it then undergoes the full claypot curry treatment. Satti sorru, for the uninitiated, is essentially rice cooked with meat, spices, and gravy in a claypot. A dish often cooked over high heat, it’s one that shouldn’t be too hard to find if you get the hankering for it.

So you take that dish and then throw biawak into the equation, and what you end up with is chunks of lizard being cooked in a bubbling, heavily spiced curry before arriving at the table still sizzling away in its little claypot. It’s definitely not the most subtle way of introducing somebody to monitor lizard, but then again, subtlety probably isn’t what you’re looking for when you seek out monitor lizard in the first place.

And, as tends to happen whenever something even remotely unusual appears on a menu, food vloggers have taken to turning it into a bit of a spectacle. A dish that would’ve been once known mainly to people already familiar with it is now liable to end up on thousands of screens overnight, drawing inevitable comments of “would you try this?” from people who probably wouldn’t go within 10 metres of an actual monitor lizard themselves.

Can do it myself?

There is, as one might ascertain, a little more to it than simply catching one of the enormous reptiles you see wandering around and throwing it into a pot. In Peninsular Malaysia, the Asian water monitor is regulated under wildlife legislation, and harvesting is subject to Perhilitan’s licensing and quota system. In other words, the fact that somebody is selling biawak doesn’t necessarily mean the animal was legally sourced, and you certainly shouldn’t be wandering into the nearest park with a sack and a set of ambitions yourself.

And I suppose it’s the combination of all these things that make biawak such an interesting little snapshot of Malaysian food culture. It occupies this weird Venn diagram comprising old-fashioned subsistence, traditional knowledge, as well as modern street food. While we might think of the monitor lizard as something that belongs in the jungle, the drain, or occasionally somebody’s viral TikTok, for some Malaysians, it belongs on the dinner table too.