EatingAsia

Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Dish

Shoot, maybe we should have ordered that instead! (Click four arrows to enlarge to full screen.)

I suppose we've all, at some point in our respective dining-out histories, suffered from food envy, that nagging feeling that your neighbors ordered more skillfully than you did.

But until Dave showed me this sequence of photos I was under the impression that only we were uncouth enough to crane our necks after a server delivering a particularly tempting plate of food to a nearby table.

The dish in question is this, a beautiful silver pomfret 'Teochew style' -- steamed with tomatoes, black mushrooms, shredded pickled mustard, sour plums, and a few paper-thin slices of three-story pork, and served garnished with cilantro leaves and slivered scallion.

It's a dish we've eaten elsewhere, but never enjoyed as much as we did the full-on tart version lovingly prepared at Teik Seng in George Town, Penang. It epitomizes, we think, the restaurant's approach to every dish it serves: top-notch ingredients, no holds barred when it comes to flavorings.

(That bacon candy was, by the way, siew yoke or roasted pork, not barbecued pork as we'd thought. We continue to wonder how Teik Seng coaxed chewy stickiness from the dish, so different in taste and texture from another version served at a restaurant two blocks over.)

The morning of the day that we ate that fish we found the uncle who busses tables and delivers drinks at Teik Seng seated there behind a pile of French beans, carefully snipping the notched end off of each one. A few hours later we enjoyed those beans (they aren't on the menu; it pays to ask about specials before you order) stir-fried with garlic, minced and chopped pork (just a little bit of each, more for flavor than for protein), tiny dried shrimp, and a few fresh prawns. The crunch of the beans contrasted with the chew of the miniature crustaceans, while the freshness of crisp-tender beans balanced the meat's fat.

On other occasions we've enjoyed Teik Seng's prawns cooked with tamarind, candied and caramelized in spots but still strikingly sour, just the way we like them (I eat them heads, shells, and all);

ethereally light, nearly greaseless deep-fried squid, tender slices wrapped in crackly-crunchy cloaks;

and a mixture of seafood (the generically named 'sea bass', fish maw, crab, prawns, squid) stewed in a claypot, redolent of huatiao jiu (Chinese sweet 'yellow' rice wine) and juices seeped from the seafood.

Teik Seng's preparations -- such as this asam fish ('fish curry' on the menu, but it's your classic Penang-style spicy and tamarind-soured fish stew with tomatoes and okra; we love the gravy that's thick with bits of lemongrass and chili-hot enough to make us break out in a sweat)

and these potato leaves stir-fried with sambal belacan (chili sauce made with belacan, or shrimp paste) and plump, briny prawns

are not always pretty, but they do always leave us almost deliriously happy.

Until, that is, we get a look at what the folks at the next table are eating.

Kedai Makanan Teik Seng, Carnavon Street between Chulia and Campbell, George Town, Penang. 12 noon-2:30p and 5:30-8:30p. Closed on Tuesdays.

Lor Mee, Oh My!

These two men are tucking into what is, if not the finest lor mee in George Town, probably the most appreciated. It's dished up six days a week at a somewhat obscure kopitiam called Lean Thye. Catch it if you can; the stall opens at 7am and is usually sold out by 9:30 or 10.

This was another happy accidental find, spotted one morning as, dog on leash, we rounded the corner onto Lebuh Ah Quee from Beach Street. Seven thirty and every table spilling out the front of the shop and onto the sidewalk next door was filled, the young dudes working the stall moving fast as lightening to fill orders (the above photo was taken just as they sold out, around 9:45a).

Dave and I nodded to each other, each thinking the same thing: 'We've got to check this place out before we leave town.'

Return we did, yesterday morning after feeding the dog and tending to the puppies (still homeless, by the way). We shared a table with two gentlemen who've been eating the dish for eons and from this particular stall for 'forty-five years or more', they said. How nice to learn from them that although the original seller recently retired, his sons have stepped in to carry on the business.

Lor mee is most simply described as yellow noodles in corn starch-thickened dark gravy, but of course there's more to the dish than that.

The gravy poured over this bowl of pasta is so thick it might almost be described as 'gloppy' -- but when it hits the noodles it thins to a perfect consistency, not too heavy but thick enough to really coat and cling to the pasta. Some lor mee gravies have a slight but appealing fishiness about them, but not this one, which is robustly meaty with an intriguing hint of star anise and cinammon. The barest flecks of egg are visible on its shiny surface.

Consider noodles (these guys mix mostly yellow mee with a few strands of rice vermicelli) and gravy the taste and texture 'base' of the dish.There's the dusting of crispy browned shallots that goes on top, then optional additions, which are listed on the white board above the prep station: sliced pork, soy-cooked duck eggs, and three-layer pork (lean meat, fat, and crispy skin).

Diners add further flavor table side in the form of fresh garlic paste and ground chili sauce. In KL and environs black vinegar often also graces the table, while at this stall tartness and heat come in one package -- the chili sauce has a sour vinegared edge.

We love that this stall offers a choice of not only 'small' and 'large' portions, but 'double XL' as well. With the specialties of other stalls to sample before we headed back to KL, we opted to share a small. It went down fast and easy, and saw us fighting for the last bits from the bottom of the bowl This is comfort food of the highest order: full-bodied in flavor, texturally easy to love (and a bit indulgent if you opt for duck egg and three-layer pork, as we did). A 'real shoveler', as Dave would say.

No wonder this lor mee stall is still going strong after almost half a century. May its new operators enjoy as much success as their father did. Long live lor mee at Lean Thye!

Lor mee stall, Lean Thye, Lebuh Ah Quee about half a block from Beach Street, Georgetown, Penang. 7am till it's sold out, usually by 9:30 or 10am. Closed Sundays and the occasional odd day (noted on the white board above the prep station). RM 2.50 small / 3.00 large / 4.00 double XL. Pork and duck egg RM 1.00 each.

 

Bacon Candy

This may not be the prettiest pork dish you've ever seen, but I'll wager it's among the most delicious.

Teik Seng is a little outdoor spot about half a block from George Town's Campbell Street Market. It's open for lunch and dinner, just 5 1/2 hours a day, and is always absolutely packed. We walked by maybe two dozen times before finally making it here for a meal.

In the last five days we've eaten at Teik Seng three times. It's a family-run joint, and the food is simply superb, every dish made with care and not a small amount of pride. Unless you come right at opening, expect to wait for a table. Once you've ordered, expect to wait for your food. But the wait is worth it, and the food is always served with a smile.

There's lots to write about Teik Seng, and I'll do so in in good time. But this, perhaps the restaurant's 'star' dish, deserves a post all it's own.

On the menu it's 'double-cooked' pork. On the plate, it's char siew, or Chinese barbecued pork belly, sliced into matchsticks and stir-fried. A well-made Malayisan-style char siew is, in its own right, something special: smoky and fatty, laquered with a sweet (but not too sweet) sticky glaze.

Take that already smoky char siew and expose it to a seasoned hot wok and you add another layer of smoke, in the form of wok hei. The glaze caramelizes even more, sticky bits turn crunchy, and some layers of fat begin to render while others crisp. Opt for an addition of chopped cili padi (fiery small fresh green chilies) and you get spare little pinpricks of heat as counterpoint to opulent meaty sweetness.

Teik Seng's double-cooked pork is the best char siew done one better. It's bacon turned confection - Bacon Candy, essentially.

Like any sweet, it's not something to be eaten every day. No matter how much we'd like to.

Kedai Makanan Teik Seng, Carnavon Street between Chulia and Campbell, George Town, Penang. 12 noon-2:30p and 5:30-8:30p. Closed on Tuesdays.

Penang Puppy Party

We take a brief hiatus from street eats to bring you ... Cute Puppies!

Since we arrived in George Town last week we've been -- in addition to dog-sitting and hawker stall hopping -- caring for three homeless puppies which a friend took in after they were found in a box in a nearby park. There were originally five, but two have been adopted (thank goodness). The remaining three desperately need homes.

They're all girls, about 6 to 8 weeks old, sweet and playful and full of spunk.

There's a general mis-perception out there that 'street dogs' don't make good pets. Or that pedigreed dogs make better pets. Well, as folks who own three wonderful mutts that we took in off the street (including the mom and pictured pup from this lot), we can tell you that there's not an ounce of truth to it.

If you're on Penang or in Kuala Lumpur (we deliver!) and can give one of these little girls a loving home for life -- or know someone who can, drop me an email.

(Oh, and if you're looking for a pet photographer, we know just the guy.)

Thanks. And please spay or neuter your pet. These little ones don't grow on trees, you know.

World Heritage and Noodle Soup

Note: Folks, I have no idea why some paragraphs in this post appear underlined when I view it in Explorer but not when I view it in Firefox, or why the underline that appears in my Typepad screen refuses to be removed. But it's evening here in George Town, and time to walk the dog again, so I'll leave it be for now. In the meantime, any suggestions for fixes welcome.

In George Town our morning routine is like this: get up, grab the dog (we've been fortunate enough to be able to dog-sit for a friend whenever we're in town), and walk three blocks to Campbell Street Market.

Over the last couple of days I've been talking to alot of Penang-ites and other concerned folks about last year's UNESCO World Heritage designation and what it's meant for George Town. Everyone's got an opinion, and those opinions are all over the map.

I'll just say this: I'm glad for the UNESCO designation, if for no other reason than that it might mean Campbell Street Market has a fighting chance of surviving as a real wet market. 

All over Asia inner-city markets are being closed to make way for development, or gussied up to the point that they resemble open-air Carrefours. Campbell Street Market is probably a shadow of its former self, but it's still a real live market. Housed in an attractive colonial-era structure modeled after Victorian-area markets in  Britain, it boasts large seafood section, a busy poultry section, some dry goods vendors, and a few pork sellers.

If you walk by around 9p, when the market is otherwise deserted and the streets around are still and dark, you'll find a few butchers breaking down carcasses for the next day's sales. Occasionally a car pulls up to the curb, and out steps an in-the-know customer whose come to purchase a kilo or two of George Town's freshest meat.

In the mornings a good portion of the market's action happens on Carnavon Lane, which runs perpendicular to Campbell Street alongside one wall of the market. Lining the road are vegetables and fruit stalls, wrinkled old men selling fresh prawns and fish, an elderly lady hawking fish balls and five kinds of bean curd, and vendors standing behind displays of dried fish and prawns and fresh noodles.

Hugging the market's Carnavon Street wall is a row of hawkers offering prepared dishes. It's here that we head right away for bags of strong, milky-sweet kopi (Malaysian-style 'sock-brewed' coffee) with ice, to sip while we're walking the dog. By now the owners of the kopi stall -- a mother and daughter who don't smile much but are friendly in their own, understated sort of way way -- know me, and all I have to do is hold up two or three fingers as I approach to indicate how many RM 1.20 (less than forty US cents) bags of coffee I want to take away.

Behind this row of vendors are four or five tables, placed snug up against the market's wall. They're always filled, and often their occupants are slurping up noodles in a soup that's tinted such a dark crimson that just looking at it nearly makes the back of your throat burn. It's always a temptation to stop for a bowlful -- but there's Dave, back on the corner with the dog, waiting for me and his bag of coffee.

Last week though, we got our chance. Walking by Campbell Street Market around 10:30 -- coffees long drunk, dog walked hours ago -- we were free to pull up a couple metal stools and sample the noodles we've been eyeing for the last four months.

The vendor advertises sup kari (coconut curry soup with noodles) and qing tang mian (clear noodle soup). What we'd been coveting, and what we ended up with, is actually a cross of the two: clear noodle soup with a splodge of red curry paste on top. The bigger the splodge, the hotter the dish.

There's sliced roast pork in there, and briny-fresh prawns with a little bit of crunch. The stock is light but meaty. And the curry paste -- well, it's fantastic: toasty flavored from roasted dried chilies, lightened with perhaps some lemon grass, spiked with garlic and ginger and given depth with maybe a few ground dried spices, fiery enough to bring a tingle to the lips but not so spicy as to overpower the porkiness of the stock. It delivers a shocking little burst of heat that quickly recedes. Didn't miss the coconut milk, not at all.

Eating at tables around us were trishaw drivers, housewives laden with plastic bags bursting vegetables, and a newspaper seller from across the way. Without Campbell Street Market to draw business, it's doubtful that this noodle seller would be here.

And so, for purely selfish reasons, I say 'Long may the UNESCO World Heritage designation stand.'

Noodle soup stall, next to Campbell Street Market, Carnavon Road almost at the corner of Campbell Street, George Town, Penang. Early morning till noon or 1pm-ish.

Finally

One nice thing about spending so much time in Penang (up north every 10 days on average it's been for us, lately) is that it's afforded the opportunity to move beyond our tried-and-true favorites and branch out into virgin (for us, anyway) culinary territory. You don't have to eat prawn noodles on every single visit when you know you'll be returning soon.

We've had our eye on this Melayu Street wonton mee stall for quite a while; it's on the route we take when we walk a friend's dog. Within 20 minutes of arriving in George Town last Thursday we were placing our orders. Finally.

The set-up is basic: a mobile cart and a few tables right on the street. Umbrellas and plastic tarps add protection from sun and rain. (The latter, unfortunately, also eliminate any chance of a breeze and make eating here a rather sweaty experience).

This hawker is a master of his art; after lifting the egg noodles from their bath of boiling water he tosses them high, sending strands of pasta flying into the air and a shower of water droplets over his cart.

We ordered our wonton mee 'dry'. In Kuala Lumpur this would land you a plate of drained noodles and choy sum tossed with soy sauce and (if you're lucky) lard oil and topped with slices of char siew (barbecued pork), a small bowl of broth and wontons on the side.

Here, our noodles and greens arrived in a bowl, partially submerged in the usual soy sauce and lard oil (praise be) thinned with a little broth. Char siew slices graced the little hillock of pasta, but so also did wontons. Pickled green chilies filled the bowl of our spoons. (In KL they'd be in a separate sauce, to which you'd probably add a bit of soy sauce.)

The verdict? Thumbs down on the char siew, which was lean verging on dry and not at all smoky, as a good piece of barbecued meat should be. The slices, a tell-tale fakey crimson at the edges, are certainly not the product of a 'cue expert.

But for the rest of the dish we would, and will, return to this stall. The dumplings are silky but substantial of skin, their filling richly porcine, and since they're not floating in hot broth they don't go all mushy within a minute of serving. The noodles are the perfect balance of tender and chewy-elastic, what a Taiwanese would call 'Q-Q'. And the 'sauce' is very nearly all about the lard oil. It's kind of like eating bacon fat mixed with just enough soy sauce to season.

And that is not a bad thing. Not a bad thing at all.

Wonton mee stall, corner of Melayu Street and Toh Aka Street (a block from Beach Street), George Town, Penang. Afternoons only, from about 2 to 6.

Back to Crab Island

Over the past 4 years we've made a number of trips to Pulau Ketam (aka Crab Island), a spot of land about 75 minutes by car and boat from KL that's home to a couple Chinese fishing villages.

The place has grown on us, so it was a pleasure to revisit in May and June for an article that appears in today's Wall Street Journal Asia 'Weekend Journal'. (The text is accompanied by a slideshow; more images here.)

One of our favorite places to eat on the island didn't make it into the final edit, so we want to take this opportunity to give some cred to Lim Chou Kok and his double-cooked char koay teow.

Mr. Lim and his family run Restoran Guo Siang, a coffee shop on Pulau Ketam's 'main street' of Jalan Pasar. You'll see him out front everyday, workin' the wok.

Unlike most wok jockeys Mr. Lim is always nattily dressed, and despite the fact that most of the time he's hanging his head over a hot pan, he always looks cool as a cucumber. I think we sweat more eating his noodles than he does making them.

So what's so special about Lim Chou Kok's char koay teow? They're twice-cooked -- the noodles alone are fried once and set aside on a big platter; when an order's placed Mr. Lim fries them again, adding in eggs, tiny Pulau Ketam prawns, Chinese chives, and bean sprouts. And rather than just koay teow (flat rice noodles), the dish is a mix of koay teow and yellow mee.

You'd think that double-frying would mean double the grease, but not so. The noodles have a nice chewiness that regular char koay teow don't, are really soaked through with the fine flavors of black soy sauce and smoke and -- amazingly -- are less oily than your average version. There's just something about Mr. Lim's noodles (he does a very good spicy koay teow goreng as well).

We're not the only ones who think so; the dish is so beloved by his fellow islanders that he serves more than 2,000 plates on the first day of every Chinese New Year.

Thanks to June for introducing us to Mr. Lim and his family, and other friendly folk on Pulau Ketam.

Twenty-Four Hours in Meinong

This woman is harvesting yelian, or 'wild' lotus. The vegetable is a product especially associated with Meinong, a township in southern Taiwan not far from Kaohsiung.

Yelian isn't technically 'wild', but cultivated in ponds that dot the township. Harvesting is a group effort. Men tend to do the deeper-water work, donning wetsuits and submerging themselves up to the neck to cut the stems of this aquatic plant from its underwater roots.

Once 'surfaced', the stems are shorn of their floating leaves, tied into bundles, and coiled.

The workers at this pond, locals all, were harvesting yelian that would be sent to Kaohsiung and Taichung (about an hour and a half away).

The vegetable is usually stir-fried with garlic and preserved soybeans. It's a textural cross between Chinese chives and the slimmest asparagus, sweet and green-tasting as the smallest spring peas.

We were in Meinong by happy accident, as the result of a last-minute decision made on the morning we were to leave Kaoshsiung. We'd planned to catch a train north to Taichung, but the weather was beautiful -- blue skies and sun after a day of spitting rain that pretty much washed out Kaohsiung's Dragon Boat Races -- and we were lured by the prospect of a day spent outside in the country.

So we called around for a guesthouse, headed to Kaohsiung's bus station,

and caught a ride on a teddy bear-blessed. Three hours later, bags stashed in a minshu (kind of a Taiwanese B&B) outside of town, we were on bicycles, looking for something to eat.

Meinong is Hakka territory, and formerly the tobacco production capital of Taiwan. Though the streets of its main (small) town are lined with their share of soulless concrete blocks, they still hide quite a few traditional U-shaped Hakka houses with interior courtyards and tiled roofs.

Coming from Taipei and Kaohsiung, the pace of life in Meinong seems almost glacial. The area isn't absolutely rural in the way that much of Southeast Asia still is, but it felt very 'Chinese countryside', in a not-much-happens-here-but-life kind of way. Meinong reminds us of rural areas outside of Shanghai that we used to escape to with our bikes when we lived there in the nineties (they're not rural anymore, we hear).

It's not hard to find local specialties; most of the town's eateries seem to serve pretty much the same thing.

Local (Taiwanese) tourists come to Meinong to eat thick rice noodles stir-fried with fatty pork, scallions, and bean sprouts,

 

or in soup; the aforementioned yelian; and a dish called donggua feng, stewed winter melon and cabbage.

What can we say about this dish? It doesn't photograph particularly well -- there's not much you can do to make a big hunk of pallid melon and its accompanying mound of equally colorless cabbage jump off the page.

But donggua feng is a wonderful thing, especially if it's eaten on a coolish evening under a sky thickening with threatening clouds. Drizzled with garlic oil, sprinkled with chopped scallion, and served in a pool of soy, sugar, and Chinese wine-flavored vegetable juices, it's pretty much the ultimate non-meat comfort food and embodies the humble heartiness of Hakka cuisine. Every table around us held two or three orders; the locals were just devouring it, and we did too.

Up early the next morning, we stuck to country lanes and biked past more Hakka houses,

several of which had jars of bean curd left out to ferment in the sun.

We ran into a couple of older Hakka women harvesting yutou (taro) and shallots, and stopped to chat.

This fiesty seventy-something year-old was a real kick, happy to take a bit of time from her work to tell us about the daily routine of Hakka women ('We've got to be up and out here early, working. Our men sure arent!'), the simple Hakka diet ('We don't eat anything too complicated. We take vegetables, we stir-fry them, we take meat, we stew it. That's it.'), and the virtues of hard work ('Look at me - I'm so healthy! It's because I work everyday. I don't want to sit at home and get old.'), and to help me with my Chinese.

Just as quickly as she dove into conversation with us she packed up her motorcycle and bid us farewell.
'OK, I'm going.My family is waiting for me to make breakfast.' It wasn't even 7:30am.

We hopped back on our bikes and headed away from town, past more wild lotus ponds and taro fields. Half an hour later we were in a one-street village where we followed our noses to a griddle packed with doughy pillows steaming away in a water bath.

As soon as were inside the shop, enveloped in a bear hug of wheaty, porky steam, we realized we were ravenous. The shuijian bao (similar to Shanghai's shengjian bao, but larger and doughier) still had 20 minutes to go, but we were sure the wait would be justified. And we were right.

Spilling scallions, Chinese chives, and chopped pork, they were crispy, chewy and -- yes -- a little greasy, but only in the best possible way.

As we were enjoying our bao the shop's proprietess fired up the griddle for another local specialty: migua jian,

rice flour and pumpkin 'pancakes'.

By the time we'd finished our bao we weren't hungry in the least, but we don't regret making room for these griddle cakes. 

Eaten with a la jiao of dried chilies, black beans, and Worcestershire sauce-like black vinegar, they were an intriguing combination of sweet and savory, salty and hot and sour -- something like dessert and main course rolled into one. 

These two treats were on our minds as, three hours later, we boarded a bus for Taichung, wishing we had another or day or three to spend in Meinong.

No street names, no details - but the noodles, wild lotus, and donggua feng can be had at the restaurant right across from the Meinong bus station.

One Up on Cracker Jack

On Sulawesi, wrapped and twisted rectangles of dried corn husk hide baje kacang (bah-jay kah-jahng),

irregularly shaped balls of roasted peanuts glued together with aren palm sugar.  The combination of savory-salty nuts with smoky, slightly bitter sugar is something like the best part of Cracker Jacks (c'mon former Cracker Jack eaters, go ahead and admit that you used to pick through the caramel popcorn for the candy-coated peanuts) -- only one thousand times better, because small-batch Indonesian palm sugar has got it all over mass-produced American molasses.

Another minimalist Indonesian sweet that's beyond delicious.

A conservative estimate of how many baje kacang we consumed over the course of 10 days in Toraja would put the number at, oh, 100 each. And we carried a few bags home (they quickly disappeared). If we came back from Sulawesi with cavities (I feel a twinge in lower molar), baje kacang are the culprit.

After dedicated, extensive sampling we can assert with confidence that Rantepao's best baje kacang are sold by two female vendors on the Pasar Bolo (the big morning market, not the one by the river). They can be found outside, on a corner of the market at the opposite end from the tuak (palm wine) sellers, sitting or standing behind their table piled high with baje kacang in yellow plastic bags (28 pieces for Rp10,000.) Their baje feature super-fresh, crunchy peanuts and gula that's glossy and crackly rather than old, dried out, and crumbly.

Vacation Food

Make that would-be vacation food. Back in June we planned a 3-day break at a couple of favorite stays on Langkawi.The plan was: no computers, no work. Just 3 days to read and sleep, see friends, eat and drink, see a bit of the island. Our first proper, non-working vacation in three years.

Plan aborted. About a week before we left we were contacted about a feature for Tiger Airlines' inflight rag (in the current issue which, if you're flying the airline this month, you 'll find on-board; the photos in this post are out-takes).

For better or worse, we said 'yes'. We figured we'd extend our visit to Langkawi by 2 nights, spend our first three days vacationing, and then devote the last couple to the job.

As we should have predicted, it didn't quite work out that way. In fact our vacation didn't really begin until the night before we flew back to KL, when we arrived back at our lodging at 8 too exhausted to do anything but grab a bottle of wine and make for the soaking tub in our room. We were asleep by 10.

Oh well. We still had a fantastic time. I've really taken a shine to Langkawi, an island that I never thought I would like at all, since I reported a feature there last September for Travel+Leisure. It's not your classic gorgeous tropical isle. Its beaches certainly aren't the best in the region, and swathes of the landscape are marred by thoughtless development. And despite the island's relatively recent designation as a UNESCO Geopark, LADA (Langkawi Development Authority) seems determined to prioritize rapid development over the preservation of its natural assets.

But for now Langkawi still has spots of beauty -- jaw-dropping beauty, in fact -- if you make the effort to find them. Rising before dawn is entirely justified when you can see and hear the rain forest come alive from the peak of Gunung Raya and get close enough to a flock of giant hornbills to hear, and almost feel, the thunderous 'whoo whoo whoo' of their flapping wings. As one of my interviewees for the story said, this island still boasts spots of real, primal nature, in some cases just 15 minutes from the door of your hotel.

Locals are laid-back and friendly. Coming from Kuala Lumpur, Langkawi feels like an entirely different Malaysia. And since the island's residents are mostly Malay it's a great place to eat Malay food.

Everyone on the island knows Siti Fatimah.This casual, open-air establishment has been open for more than 16 years. It's a family-run business and mom -- that's Siti Fatimah -- is still in the kitchen, cooking up more than twenty dishes every day.

This is a lunchtime place, and for the most varied selection it's best to arrive by noon or so, especially when tourist season is in high gear and Malaysians arrive by the busload for their mid-day feed.

We ate spectacularly well at SF over the course of two lunches. Highlights included sambal tumis udang (above), small shell-on prawns in a sweet and spicy sauce punctuated by the bitter snap of tiny eggplant; fresh bamboo shoots in a mild chili sauce heavily scented with star anise; pucuk paku masak lemak, tender fresh fern tips stewed with mild spices and fresh turmeric root in coconut milk; kacang goreng kunyit, turmeric-fragrant, crisp-tender green beans with slices of chewy, briny fishcake; and ayam makak kecap, free-range chicken coated with a sticky-sweet and entirely finger-lickable kecap manis-based sauce.

Several grilled fish are always on the menu, and SF does an excellent ulam (fresh and blanched vegetables and fresh herbs) that includes a number of unusual greens and banana flower -- along with the usual okra, wing beans, and cucumber -- and can be eaten with one or all of three different sambal (chili sauces).

Probably our hand-down favorite dish was the sweet, sour, fruit, spicy, and utterly beguiling kerabu manga (opening photo), a salad of skin-on ripe mango, shallots, and fiery cili padi dressed with budu (an intense fish sauce along the lines of Thai bplaa raa), sugar, and kalamansi. Truth to tell it was this dish especially that drew us back for our second meal at SF.

Siti Fatimah is also the place to try perhap's Langkawi's only true-blue local specialty: kerabu beranok, a salad of fresh raw sea cucumber, chopped and tossed with cilantro, shallots, grated coconut, chilies, fish sauce, coconut milk, and lime juice.

On this dish I cry 'Uncle'. I was first served sea cucumber over 25 years ago in Sichuan, where it was (and maybe still is) standard Chinese banquet fare. Back then I hated it's slippery goopiness. In this dish I didn't care for its gristly toothsomeness, despite the overall pleasing mix of flavors.

But to each his own. It's something everyone should try at least once.

If you're heading to Langkawi make room in your schedule for Siti Fatimah. In fact, I would consider heading to Langkawi just for a meal or two at this place. Mom is cooking -- and she's very, very talented.

Restoran Siti Fatimah, Bt. 5 1/4, Jalan Kampong Tok Senik, Kawasan Mata Air, Langkawi.

More Langkawi recommendations, based on experience: Stay here or here, book some sort of nature tour with this outfit, and if you're hankering after Italian food and/or an incredibly reasonably priced bottle of Italian vino, head over to L'Osteria in Pantai Tengah.