By all rights, Kota Bharu should be better known for Malaysian cuisine.

The food obsessed head to the nation's capital Kuala Lumpur for diversity of food, make pilgrimages to the island of Penang to trawl for street food and head down to Melaka for Nonya cuisine. Malaysia has strong and proud regional food traditions, but very few make their way northeast to Kota Bharu.

Kota Bharu is the Kelantan state capital, sitting in the north-eastern corner of peninsular Malaysia within a few kilometers from the southern Thai border. In a culinary sense, much of the local food bleeds across the border into Thailand. On the Thai side, a popular breakfast is khao yam where on the Malaysian side, you'd tuck into the identical dish nasi kerabu, a rice dish tinted blue with flower petals and served with fresh herbs, raw vegetables, salted fish, and dried prawns. The city's coastal location at the mouth of the Kelantan River provides a wealth of seafood, and judging by the volume of its use, a preponderance of oily mackerel.

Both sides of the immediate border are strongly Muslim: the Kelantan state attempts (and fails) to introduce qisas and hudud laws on a regular basis. Unless you happen to seek out the handful of Chinese restaurants around town, pork and beer is off the menu.

Much of the joy of eating and seeking out food in Kota Bharu are the unexpected turns that more recognizable Malaysian foods take. Most people are familiar with keropok: they're virtually the same as the pinkish Styrofoam prawn crackers on sale around at Chinese restaurants around the Western world. The north eastern Malaysian version of keropok, keropok lekor is the least appetising food that can be imagined when uncooked. They appear as slightly gelatinous grey tubes of fishy dough that glistens with an oleaginous sheen.

When deep-fried however, they turn into chewy fish sticks with a slightly crisp brown exterior. They're still overwhelmingly fishy and served with a sweet tamarind and chilli sauce on the side. The taste sensation is about the chewy mouthfeel and fishiness. They're only related to the pink prawn crackers in the loosest sense and like most street foods, they're a one note dish. That note is mackerel.

The local barbecue chicken dish, ayam percik, is marinated in a sweet coconut and chili marinade and served with an extra slug of the creamy  coconut gravy as sauce. On the barbecue, it outputs a heavy and coconutty smoke that vendors fan away. The local laksa (noodle soup), laksang, comes filled with broad white rice noodles in a viscous white, coconut- (and mackerel-) filled gravy. Unlike most laksa, it’s served cold from breakfast stands around the central marketplace. There are countless kuih, bite-sized and predominantly sweet morsels of pastries and cakes; too many to summarise the differences.

For someone who travels for food, it's hard to reconcile why Kota Bharu rarely rates a mention as a Malaysian food destination for foreigners.