Pulau Pinang | Penang Tourism & Travel Guide | Georgetown UNESCO World Heritage City | Penang Hotel Resort | Penang Food Paradise

From MasterChef to Malaysia, Ray McVinnie finds plenty of flavours to savour in Penang’s Georgetown.

The Malaysian island of Penang, or Pulau Pinang, which translates as betel nut island, (there is a betel nut palm on the Penang State flag) is situated at the start of the Strait of Malacca off the west coast of the Malay Peninsula.

Georgetown, the main centre in Penang, is a vibrant, bustling place and the old town has recently been made a Unesco World Heritage site. Yet it is thankfully still a city full of locals going about their business and just tatty enough to command respect, avoiding any suggestion of the theme park or museum.

In the streets and alleys is found the distinctive architecture, arcaded streets lined with thick- walled narrow shops with shuttered top-storey windows designed to deal with intense heat and monsoon rains.

Wandering around Georgetown, I found small mansions, often occupied by Chinese guilds, row after row of traditional shop houses (shop on the bottom, living on the top), most painted white but many painted in colours like yellow, red, turquoise and tangerine, but faded and mottled by tropical weather like well- washed fabric.

I stayed at the Straits Collection Hotel’s Stewart Lane property, four charming shop houses which look like the original inhabitants left just before owners Narelle McMurtrie and Alison Fraser had the walls waterblasted and redecorated the interiors with choice Chinese/ Malaysian artefacts, canopied beds, rain showers in the downstairs apartments’ open courtyards, put in a library and reading room and next to it installed a great little cafe and bar on the corner of the block.

Georgetown is also studded with picturesque Indian, Chinese, Muslim and Christian places of worship – check out Jalan Masjid Kapitan Keling Rd for the “walk of harmony” where you will pass an example of each. The last one is St George’s Church, a bijou confection of neoclassical pillars and porticos set on a dazzling green lawn.

Built in 1818, it looks like it is made of pure white royal icing and was the first Anglican church in Asia. But the most striking things about Georgetown are the proliferation of people selling food from carts, either on the street or in what are known as hawker centres, and the number of people eating at all times of the day.

Hawkers were originally itinerant sellers of cooked food who would roam certain neighbourhoods selling one of the more than 50 specialty dishes that have been identified as Penang heritage food. Like many South- East Asian cuisines, Malaysian food takes rather aggressive raw ingredients like chillies, ginger, belachan (fermented prawn paste), tempers them with soothing ingredients like fresh coconut cream and dark palm sugar, and turns them all into a spicy yet elegant and refined cuisine.

An example of a quintessential Penang dish is hokkien mee, a fragrant prawn- based soup served with yellow noodles, sometimes also with rice vermicelli, water spinach and bean sprouts and topped with prawns and thin-sliced pork.

The other example is probably assam laksa, which, unlike the rich creamy coconut-based laksa lemak found in Singapore, is a herbaceous tamarind-based hot sour fish soup with noodles, lime and pineapple. It was said to me that in Penang, people rarely argue about religion or politics; they save that energy for arguing about how the best dishes should be cooked and where to find them, so some may disagree with my examples.

These days most food sellers are clustered in hawker centres, which are a bit like the food courts we have here in New Zealand, except they are outside under one big roof, sometimes with many stalls, sometimes with only three or four. You simply walk into a hawker centre, find an empty table, one of you guards it if the place is busy, while someone orders the food that is delivered to you. The cost of what is always very good cooking never seemed to be more than about $5 per head. I ate hawkers’ food all the time in Penang and I ate very well.

I was lucky enough to have expat American Robyn Eckhardt as my guide to Georgetown’s food. Robyn is an international food writer who has made Penang a speciality and her close scrutiny of its food scene has resulted in specialised knowledge of where to find the best examples of many heritage dishes. We spent two days trying them and only scratched the surface.

Penang, like much of Asia, is a morning place. The best food is often found in the morning, with many of the hawker spots having different vendors at breakfast, lunch and dinner. So with a carefree “makan-makan” – it means “let’s eat” – we set off early one morning, passed the shop where Jimmy Choo grew up and learnt to make shoes, and headed for a traditional kopitiam, or coffee shop, for breakfast.

Forget about muesli, toast and eggs; when you are in Georgetown plunge in and eat like the locals. We tried the Toon Leong Coffee Shop (corner of Jalan Transfer and Jalan Argyll), where we caffeined up on delicious Malaysian coffee, mine sweetened with condensed milk.

Robyn said always ask for it “gaow” or strong and you will get Italian-strength coffee. This shop included two Indian men with a cart selling made-to-order nasi khandar, a variety of meat curry with okra, curry gravy and rice. The beef is the best and a steal at about $2.50. This is the sort of thing people eat for breakfast here – they are straight into it!

Next was Chow Rastra Market for pulut hitam, my favourite breakfast food, warm black rice porridge sweetened with dark caramelly gula melaka (palm sugar) and liberally drizzled with salted fresh coconut cream. Then it was Aik Hoe DimSum on Lebuh Carnarvon between Lebuh Chulia and Lebuh Campbell. Ignore the dim sum and ask for shen zeng mian, a chow mein-like dish of crisp noodles, pork, shrimps and pickled chilies that you mix at the table. We asked for cups of Chinese tea. This was served with two cups for each of us, a quaint custom that means you have a second cup cooling to enjoy immediately after you finish the first. I saw this everywhere in Georgetown.

Diagonally over from the Lebuh Campbell wet market is a stall selling very good hokien mee and roti, the extravagantly flaky, non- greasy fried Indian bread, served plain or filled with eggs and chopped onion. In Lorong Stewart, off Jalan Masjid Kapitan Keling and across the road from the Goddess of Mercy Temple, is the Kafe Hai Bong where you can try the lor mee – yellow noodles in thick pork gravy with Chinese five-spice, smashed garlic, chilli and vinegar sauce. Get a table outside and watch the worshippers at the temple and the gigantic pink clouds of incense smoke wafting heavenwards.

Georgetown is the type of place best enjoyed wandering around watching the locals. At the beginning of Lebuh Carnarvon are a couple of shops selling everything for the kitchen and house, so if you need a beautiful wooden mooncake mould or just some good knives, this is the place.

When the heat started to get to me, the answer was a restorative bowl of cendol, a mix of shaved ice, red beans, pandan noodles and lots of coconut cream and palm sugar syrup. It was like a shot of adrenalin. My favourite was the stall on the corner of Jalan Penang and Jalan Keng Kwee, and not the one saying “famous cendol”, but the one on the other side of Jalan Keng Kwee.

The Fort Cornwallis food court is a large hawker centre by the old British fort. We tried the mee goreng sotong, fried noodles with squid, tofu, chili gravy and a big squeeze of lime. Don’t be put off by the look of some of this food. For most hawkers, food styling or any elementary presentation doesn’t exist but the flavours and textures are superb. Robyn aptly described the mee goreng sotong as a big messy pile with a sort of delicious slow building burn, perfect with the fresh lime.

Later that evening we strolled through little India and ate at Kolkatai, a cart on the corner of Jalan Sehala and Lebuh Penang (not to be confused with Jalan Penang). Here we ate their speciality, puthu, steamed rice and steamed organic wheat cakes – crumbly, light as air cupcake- sized cakes with freshly grated coconut and jaggery (raw brown sugar). Knockout!

On the corner of Lebuh Pasar and Lebuh King is Syarikat Sayang, an Indian stall selling Indian sweets, pakoras, battered deep-fried vegetables, the best samosas and lentil fritters.

Little India is also packed, unsurprisingly, with shops and stalls selling everything else that is India. In fact, the whole of Georgetown seems to be about eating or shopping. The next day was a real highlight. A short taxi ride away from the centre of Georgetown was the suburban market of Pulau Tikas.

There you will find Madame Khaw, someone Robyn described as “wildly talented”. She is a Straits-Chinese woman, or Nonya, who cooks traditional Malay-Hokkien Chinese or Nonya fusion cuisine. She sits with her back to the market building and has a cart loaded with bowls and saucepans and a queue of people buying food to take away. We turned up at 9am, each with a large enamel plate and a fork, and proceeded to work our way through what was on offer. I went back for seconds and it still only cost about $15 for two. It is some of the best Nonya food I have tasted.

We then bought some hand- made soy sauce from a family who have been making it for generations and wandered over to the Indian man and his son who were cooking appam balak over charcoal. We both finished a wedge of this warm crumpet-like sandwich filled with peanuts and palm sugar.

The list of food to try in Penang is enormous – not getting through it is half the fun. If you don’t have a guide, most hotels will have information on what to eat and maps. Anyone you ask will also have an opinion and I didn’t taste anything bad while I was there.

Not running out of new things to try is my idea of holiday heaven and Georgetown truly fits the bill.

Ray McVinnie visited Penang courtesy of the Malaysian government and the Malaysian Kitchen Programme, running in New Zealand this month.

- Sunday Star Times

Posted by admin on May 23, 2011 under Travelogue.