EatingAsia

Where We'll Be Tomorrow AM

When we were on Penang two weeks ago we re-visited eighty-year-old coffee shop Toon Leong. It's been 18 months, but we found the same vintage decor, same vintage crowd, same vintage owner - though he and his son now wear matching 'uniforms' consisting of navy blue shorts and lighter blue t-shirts.

The coffee is still as good as ever and, now that we've ranged around a bit, I feel almost qualified to pronounce it maybe the best in Georgetown. It's rich and smooth, with an intensity bordering on chocolatey, and served over ice it's reminiscent of a great Vietnamese cafe sua da.

Places like Toon Leong draw us back to Penang.

Here we are, again.

And there we'll be, tomorrow morning.

Kwongtuck Sundries

Penang-ites like to chat. It's one of the best things about the place.

Many older residents can be a bit stand-offish at first, but we've found that's usually because they're not confident of their English. In most cases if you're friendly and a little persistent the barrier falls, and this is when you can hear some great stories.

Walking up Campbell Street towards Cintra one morning we passed a big smoked pig's leg hanging in the entry to an 'everything' shop called Kwongtuck Sundries. The place looked, well, storied. The old man sitting at the counter glanced up at us without obvious interest, then back down at his paper. We were on our way to somewhere else and kept walking.

A couple days later we found ourselves lunching next door at Tho Yuen, an old Cantonese restaurant, where we ordered our meal from the stall at the front. The vendor's Hainanese-style poached chicken is fine, his roasted chicken is excellent, and his kiam chai boi superb, sharply sour and spicy with an intensely fowl-flavored broth. After two days of heavy-duty hawker stall chowing we were in need of vegetables, and Tho Yuen's female staff cooks choy sum leaves, lettuce, and broccoli just so, blanching the greens for thirty seconds maximum and then drizzling them with garlic oil and soy and oyster sauces.

We took a table on the sidewalk. Next to us was a collection of regulars seated around a couple teapots, all in various states of caffeine and comradery-induced gaiety. One man offered us some local cashews (perfectly toasted, crisp and tasty), another told us of family in California, still another listed the advantages of living in Penang (relatively little traffic, green space, good food). When the men learned that we were in Penang to work on a food story, they simultaneously turned to the shop behind them.

"You've got to check this place out!" they said. It was Kwongtuck Sundries. We hadn't noticed until then that their table sat directly below the big pig's leg.

"Will the owner talk to us, do you think?" I asked. The old man was once again behind the counter, reading a newspaper, studiously ignoring the activity right outside his shop.

"Definately!" they laughed.

And sure enough, when I approached and told him that we were interested in old foods in Georgetown eighty-year-old Woo Shee Khow lit up like a jack o' lantern, jumping up to grab a copy of a local newspaper featuring a story about his shop.

Kwongtuck has been selling liquor, packaged foods and sauces, dried fish and meats for over 170 years. The leg hanging in the entryway is 'Chinese prosciutto', salted and air-dried ham from Chin Wah district in Zhejiang province, forty-two ringgit a kilo. Kwangtuck used to receive stock directly from China, until Penang lost free port status. Now everything comes via Kuala Lumpur.

The shop also formerly sold a much wider selection of Chinese liquors, but that business fell off when Malaysia increased the duty on imported booze.

"But I won't complain too much about that," said Mr. Woo, referencing an old Chinese saying: Ren pa chu ming, zhu pa fei. (A man is afraid of becoming well-known, a pig is afraid of getting fat.)

Mr. Woo is the fourth generation in his family to run Kwangtuck, whose name is a combination the first character of his great-grandfather's hometown (Kwangtung or Canton) and another character, de in Mandarin and tuck in Cantonese, which means 'virtue' or 'moral character'.

On a wall at the rear of the shop hang two black and white photos. On the left is Mr. Woo's father as a young man, on the right his grandfather, in traditional Chinese dres. "Taken during the Qing Dynasty," Mr. Woo proudly told us.

We've developed a bit of a fetish for old Chinese shop houses. Architecturally speaking Kwongtuck is gorgeous, its high wood-beamed ceiling exposed and original wooden staircase intact. Light streaming through the shop's characteristic interior air well floods its rear reaches. Standing in the front, amidst boxes of dried squid and sea cucumber, you can squint your eyes and almost imagine this little slice of Georgetown a hundred and fifty years ago.

We would have liked to hang out with Mr. Soo a bit longer, but we had another appointment to keep. We'll be back.

Before we left, Dave asked Mr. Woo to pose for a photo. He agreed, but insisted on donning a proper shirt first.

Cafe Society

Everytime we go to Penang we cover Georgetown on foot, north to south and east to west, often walking the same stretch of road five or six times in a single day. Yet - amazingly - we always come away with new finds.

This find isn't our own; a friend who's known Penang much longer than we have can take credit for the perfect kopi with toast and kaya we enjoyed the other morning at Toh Soon Cafe.

To label Toh Soon a 'cafe' may be stretching it a bit. The place is more of a family-owned assembly line occupying a galley kitchen that opens onto an alley crowded with tables.

At 8am on Saturday we grabbed the last two available seats, placed our order and, following the example set by the cafe's regulars, sat back to await delivery.

Malaysian kopi has its detractors, but when it's made well (and it's not always) we quite like it. Like Vietnamese coffee - about which most every tourist seems to rave - it's adulterated. Most beans that go into a classic cup of Malaysian kopi  are roasted with sugar, which caramelizes and even burns during the process, resulting in an exceedingly dark and slightly bitter brew that - like Vietnamese cafe (in Vietnam beans are also often roasted with sugar, among other ingredients) - marries perfectly with sweetened condensed milk. 

Toh Soon's kopi is not the very best in town, we think. But it's right up there.

Another element in Toh Soon's favor:before it sandwiches salted butter and a thin smear of excellent kaya (coconut and egg jam), the cafe's bread is painstakingly grilled over charcoal. It's quite an ingenious contraption they've got going in that galley kitchen, actually - an old oil drum with a charcoal fire in the center. On top, water boils for kopi. Beneath, flames brown the bread.

Sure, a toaster would be more convenient. But the result wouldn't be as delicious, and that's why Toh Soon is heaving. Untill 9am anyway, when traffic police take to the streets to enforce Georgetown's ban on curbside parking, and you're practically guaranteed a seat.

Toh Soon Cafe, alley off Lebuh Campbell just shy of Jalan Penang (across the street from from Lean Wah Silk Merchant), Georgetown, Penang. Mornings, every other Tuesday closed.

We're Taking a Brief Hiatus ...

                One darned friendly mee goreng vendor, King Street, Georgetown

...from our  'I Love Taiwan' series for a few posts on Penang.

We've been here for a couple of days and - yes - we still love it. More to come.

Georgetown in the PM: Variety Meats and Fujian Fry

Gurney Drive is all well and good (hard to beat the ikan bakar at Song River, though you must wait until 10pm for the vendor to fire up his griddle), but for the most part we prefer to do our Penang nighttime food crawling in Georgetown. Less traffic and fewer tacky (and for the most part, depressingly empty) bars, not to mention hawker stalls selling eats of a generally higher quality.

First up on an evening back in January, the duck and pig innards koay chiap dished up by this man and his son, at their long-running (almost thirty years) stall on Lebuh Kimberley. Their specialty makes me  thank the powers that be for landing us in Malaysia almost four years ago. Despite two years residency in Hong Kong and twice that amount of time in China, I never learned to enjoy offal until I moved to Kuala Lumpur.

Koay chiap are pasta squares made from rice, tapioca, and mung bean flours that curl into fantastically chewy tubes when they hit boiling water. In this dish they share space with slivers of pig ears, stomach, intestine, and tongue, as well as some plain old pork, and duck giblets, liver, and meat. There are a few chunks of blood in there as well, and a hard-boiled egg. Everything's floating in an impossibly intense broth fragrant with five-spice and fairly redolent with that offal funk that's off-putting to some, appetite-rousing to others.

I'm not going to b.s. you - to appreciate this dish you really must enjoy 'variety meats' to some extent, or have a desire to develop said appreciation. (It is possible to order an offal-free version, though the flavor is there in the broth.)

And you must be sure that when your order of koay chiap arrives it's decorated with a blob of chili sauce (11 o'clock in the photo above). If you're a foreigner it won't automatically be added to your bowl; I learned of the stuff's existence from observing other diners drift over to the stall, bowls in hand, and dip up spoonfuls from a plastic tub. It's nothing but dried chilies and a bit of Sichuan peppercorn roasted in oil, but the sauce pairs perfectly with the aggressively flavored innards.

From innards on Lebuh Kimberly we drifted over to Carnavon Road's Chew Kee Fujian chao stall (specializing in stir-fries Fujian/Hokkien-style), and a couple of perhaps more accessible dishes: fish meat meehoon - thick slices of fillet, thick ginger coins, chopped tomato, and plenty of choy sum stems in a thin, black peppery broth made milky with, well, milk -

 

and chen yee foo mei,

the same variety of white fish, deep-fried until golden and crusty and served with choy sum and more ginger, in a viscous gravy poured over a bed of fried wheat noodles. It may look a mess but this dish was full of flavor, so gingery and smoky; despite their almost being lost in the gravy the wheatiness of the noodles came through loud and clear. A simple, soulful stir-fry that we will certainly seek out when we're next in Georgetown.

This vendor will never go down as the most friendly in the history of Penang, but he might be one of the hardest-working. We enjoyed watching him wrestle with the flames as we waited for our dishes to arrive. Meanwhile other tourists obviously in search of something to eat walked on by, eyeing his stall warily as they headed for Chulia Street, where more foreigner-friendly - but almost universally awful - hawker stalls were doing a knock-up trade.

Koay chiap stall, Lebuh Kimberley, Georgetown, Penang. Nights only.

Fujian chao stall, Carnavon Road almost at the corner of Chulia Street, Georgetown, Penang. Nights only.

An Expensive Catch

I've got a couple of looming deadlines but wanted to point you all to a pictorial about a visit we made over the weekend to a fish farm near Pulau Ketam that Dave has posted on his photo blog.

At the farm we watched workers wrestle several longdan (a type of fish - anyone know its name in English?) from the water. Longdan sell, at wholesale, for a whopping 50 ringgit per kilo. The farm purchases longdan 'babies' for 40 ringgit each; after 2 years they reach about 15 kilos (like the ones we saw harvested) in weight. Give them another 2 or 3 years and they can weigh up to 50. That's RM 2,500 (about U$725 per fish).

Though this farm ships their fish as far as Hong Kong, the longdan we saw were destined for a dinner table somewhere on the Malaysian peninsula. I wonder if those longdan tasted like U$725. Unfortunately, we were not invited to join the feast.

There's Something in the Air ...

...and it doesn't smell too nice. We don't mind.

It's shrimp season on Pulau Ketam, a little island off the coast of Klang. A few weeks ago, needing a collective break from our computer screens, we rolled out of bed before the sun was up, hit the road, and arrived at the jetty in time for the 8:45am ferry.

As soon as we'd pedaled past the two-block 'downtown' (a bicycle's the way to go here) we began to notice shrimp - on front porches and back porches, tables and chairs, sidewalks and sheets of plastic suspended above the ground - laid out to dry in the sun. Who knew shrimp has a season?

On the Teochew half of the island we came across a woman tending to her crustaceans, which were spread out on the wooden decking in front of her house.

She swept them into a pile in the middle of the space, then into a dustpan, and lifted the pan high, shaking the shrimp back out onto the deck. This ensures that they dry evenly, she said. She does it once a day.

How long does it take the shrimp to thoroughly dry? I asked. She looked at me like I was an idiot. Depends on the sun, of course. This batch had been out for two days.

"These are Malaysian shrimp, not Indonesian," Ms. Chua assured us (Is there a difference?), "and I don't add salt, preservatives, or any coloring. Have a look - my shrimp aren't so red like others."

Good enough for us. We purchased half a kilo (opening photo) to take home. Sure enough, they're honestly delicious - not too salty, with true prawn flavor. A little bit sweet, even. I've yet to cook with them; we've just been eating them out of hand as a snack.

Thank you, Ms. Chua (shown here, in front of her beautifully painted house, with one of her sons).

Ms. Chua and her shrimp can be found at 113A Bagan Teochew, Pulau Ketam.

Small Wonders

 

Who doesn't, on occasion, find themselves in need of a 1-cm-deep wok perched on a 2-cm-high stove, complete with lid, ladle, and a single tiny fish? Or a teapot no bigger than the tip of an adult's pinky finger, chained to a miniature thermos bearing etched flowers that will trigger nostalgia for anyone who ever lodged in a Chinese hotel before bottled water was available everywhere (remember the boiled water attendants on every floor)?.

The wok sits on a bookshelf in my office, a souvenir from our January sojourn on Penang (here, by the way, is the article that took us there). In the odd but endearingly caught-in-a-timewarp west coast town of Balik Pulau we visited the workshop of the island's only silversmith specializing in miniatures. Mr. Fong is sixty-eight years old; he started learning his craft at age thirteen.

We're not trailblazers in any respect. This guy has been written up in publications from Kuala Lumpur to Japan to Europe, and he's got the framed clips to prove it. But his notoriety in no way diminishes the uber- coolness of what he does for a living.

 

Mr. Fong says it took him at least ten years to master the art: 'Oh, I was terrible when I started!' he claims. 'Slowly, slowly, I do better. And now people come to Balik Pulau just to see me!'

He's very proud, and not particularly humble.

 

These days, he says, he's doing fewer and fewer of the sort of delicate pieces pictured above - not because of failing eyesight but because he's losing dexterity in his fingers.

A Penang treasure, Mr. Fong is, worth making your way over to Balik Pulau for.

While you're there, you might tuck into another sort of Penang treasure: laksa. Two popular stalls face off across the main road (the name of the road? I don't know, and you don't need to. It's that kind of small town).

The one occupying a front corner of Nan Guang coffee shop dishes up laksa assam and laksa siam. The soup of the former is thin but full of fish flakes. It boasts a robust fish flavor, a fair bit of heat, and lots of tamarind tang. The latter, named - obviously - for the influences bestowed on the dish by Malaysia's northern neighbor, is thickened and enriched with coconut milk and heady with lemongrass and galangal. It tastes, at first spoonful, very Thai. It's also delicious.

 

But it's the assam laksa dished up across the way that we love best.

This vendor's been at it for thirty-six years, and his assam laksa is fishier and more tart (with plenty of assam keping, or sour slices) and spicy than the version across the street. The sign on his cart says 'laksa lemak' but it's the assam laksa you'll be wanting to try. 

 

Laksas siam and assam and Mr. Fong the silver miniatures artist, main street, Balik Pulau, Penang.

Soon-to-Be New and Improved (But We like the Old and Showing-Its-Years)

Ipoh was a mixed bag of hit and misses. Part of the problem was time - we didn't have enough and, since I was on assignment, it wasn't entirely our own. We blew town knowing we'd barely scratched its surface. (We did, however visit that tree; a former colleague of Dave's even tells us he appeared on the evening news hanging with some politicos).

Among the misses: entirely forgettable chicken rice at an Ipoh institution. Among the hits: the infamous ganja chicken (sorry Preeta, no photos) and dim sum at Restoran Foh San.

This place (like Lou Wong Tauge Ayam, apparently) gets mixed reviews. I don't know if we hit Foh San on an unusually good day (or detractors have hit it on off days), or if the fact that we were sharing a table with one of the owners and a demanding regular was doing the ordering had anything to do with it, but our breakfast amounted to some of the best dim sum we've eaten in a long time.

The prawn and scallop dumplings were a highlight, the wrappers lacking any gummyness and the seafood so fresh that one bite flooded our mouths with its briny juices.

Stir-fried radish cake (above, 3 o'clock) was surprisingly delicate and as light on grease as an absorbent cake fried in lots of oil can possibly be. The dish's bean sprouts were plenty crunchy and the cook added just the right amount of Foh San's housemade chili sauce.

Bean curd skin-wrapped prawn rolls (9 o'clock) were another hit, extremely crunchy and packed with not only prawn but large chunks of firm white-fleshed fish. I didn't even contemplate dipping into the mayo on the side.

spinach dumplings filled with minced pork, mushrooms, and water chestnuts 

I'm a huge fan of lotus seed paste which, paired with salted egg, is common filling for mooncakes. Foh San makes its own paste, and its perfect - smooth, not too stiff, and only slightly sweet. The predominant flavor here is lotus seeds. As it should be.

 

Foh San puts the paste inside chewy glutinous rice flour wrappers, coats them with sesame seeds, and deep-fries the lot. They're tasty, but they can't hold a candle to the lin yoong bao (opening photo), the lotus paste-salted egg mooncake filling inside a steamed bao. Check out the beautiful layers on that bao

We loved Foh San, but to tell the truth we're not sure if we'll go back. Located on the ground floor of the Perak Chinese Amateur Drama Association, the restaurant is quite a classic scene - whirring ceiling fans, steamer-laden carts whizzing here and there, tables crowded with mostly regulars who keep the volume pretty high.

But around the beginning of May Foh San will look very different; the restaurant is moving to a brand-new four-story building with a roof garden. Out will go the old tablecloths, chopsticks, steamer baskets (round baskets will be replaced with square), and tea pots (except the blue-flowered pots, in which cha wang - the 'king of teas' - is served). There will be no more carts; patrons will have to order their dim sum. Everything will be new and spiffy and smart. Presumably, the food will be as good as on the morning we dined there.

But we just can't imagine it being the same.

Restoran Foh San, G/F Perak Chinese Amateur Dramatic Association, corner Jalans Mustapha Al-Bazri and Dato Thawil Azar, Ipoh. Mornings.

As of the beginning of May (estimated): No. 51 Jalan Leong Nam, Ipoh.

***

An aside: this will be the last time - for a while - that I plug Dave's new photo blog, but the opening photo of this post is my favorite from our recent sojourn in northern Thailand. This lady really touched us.

Chicken Joy in Penang

The first time we visited Penang we were lucky enough to hook up with a taxi driver who's crazy for food (that's kind of a silly thing to write, actually; we've yet to meet a Penang-ite who wasn't crazy for food). Over the course of one long, delicious morning he introduced us to an exquisite version of assam laksa, a wonderfully porky specialty that's often overlooked by visitors, and a very good cendol that might have assumed 'best' status in our book if we hadn't already eaten better in Malacca.

Mr. Goh also introduced us to Kafe Kheng Pin, an old-timey coffeeshop where a hawker sells exquisite lor bak and prawn fritters (more on those tasties later). As we sat there eating, licking our fingers in between bites, he pointed to another stall where a Hainan chicken vendor was setting up for business.

'And that,' he said, 'is the best chicken rice around.'

We groaned. We just didn't have any more room! But we never forgot those words of Mr. Goh's, uttered almost two years ago.

And so, when we found ourselves in Penang at the beginning of this year we set aside time for two visits to Kheng Pin, one for lor bak and prawn fritters and deep-fried squid, the latter of which we had somehow missed the first time around (and oh my, what an amazing deep-fried squid it is), and one for Hainan chicken rice.

 

On this day we found the vendor working with his wife and their son. It was lunchtime, and almost every table was graced with an order or three of chicken rice. We waited a full fifteen minutes for our lunch, watching as she cleavered chickens one after the other with amazing speed, while he dressed the plates with cucumbers and a drizzle of this and that; meanwhile the couple's son son flew around the coffeeshop delivering plates of goodness to appreciative and hungry customers. 

Well, we don't know about 'best', but Mr. Goh's praise for this version of what is in reality a very simple dish was on the money. Our order included breast meat, usually the least tasty part of the chicken. But this bird really had flavor. Before slicing a breast into strips to top the rice Mrs. Chicken Rice whacks it once with the side of her cleaver, resulting in wonderfully tender pieces of meat. The chicken is cooked perfectly, still light pink at the bone, soft but with a bit of chew, and absolutely silky. The meat is almost eclipsed by the rice, individual grains shiny with chicken fat and infused with the bird's flavor.

This stall, like most of the best in Penang, has been around for a while; Mrs Chicken Rice's mother opened set up shop at Kheng Pin over forty years ago. Happily, the couple's son looks set to carry on the business. It's a must-visit if you find yourself in Penang.

Hands down the best Hainan bird we've eaten in Penang. But in all of Malaysia? Well, that may be up for debate in a couple days. This morning we're off to Ipoh, which many Malaysians would argue is the spot for chicken prepared in the Hainan way.

Hainan chicken rice at Kheng Pin, 80-82 Jalan Penang, Georgetown Penang. 630a-3pm (Hainan chicken rice from about 10-ish). Closed Monday.