Malaysian gastronomy has built a unique identity that plays an important role in the development of the tourism industry, especially in Sabah. Local food consumption is a good medium to promote tourist back to Sabah. The study aimed to measure the validity and reliability of perception and motivation towards local food questionnaire. The content for the questionnaire was used as references to develop this questionnaire. The forward translation was done by researchers and professionals with culinary and tourism background meanwhile backward translation was done by professionals from another field. The Cronbach alpha as reliability for the questionnaire was 0.854 for perception and 0.787 for motivation. ICC for perception was 0.793 indicates good consistency whereas for motivation ICC was at 0.424 indicates poor consistency. Further test-retest method analysis revealed the reliability of 0.760 to 0.854 for both components, indicating a scale of high reliability. However, the Wilcoxon signed-rank test showed that the motivation component was not statistically different, T = 30.5, z = 1.70, p = 0.090, two-tailed. The results showed that the designed questionnaire is valid and reliable to measure the perception and motivation towards local food among tourists in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah.