Gurney Drive Hawker Center, Penang, Malaysia

I've done it again, guys. I've created a backlog of posts that I say I'll get to, but then I'll go on another trip and think:

"Hey! This is fresher in my mind, I'll just bang it out and then get back to the last batch."

Yeah, right, Vicky Sun. You do this EVERY. DAMNED. TIME. You've got a backlog of "I'll get to this" all the way back to 2013. Half of these restaurants probably don't even exist anymore, and you've forgotten about most of what you've eaten. Great job.

Well. Maybe I'll just start a new blog series where I post food photos and just yell at myself between the pictures. That's bound to get SOME sort of traction somewhere, right? There's a market for just about anything these days...

A N Y W A Y S . . .

This past month, I traveled to Singapore to see the boothang, and then we popped over to Penang for a quick 3-day tryst. Now, I've not been to Malaysia except for Sabah with my mum when I was... eight? I don't remember much apart from water bungalows, Komodo dragons, and durian popsicles. 

Over the past few years, I've heard quite a bit about Penang being an incredible place to go for food adventures, and - being the FOMO food snob that I am - of course that means I just HAD to go. 

We stayed in the northeastern part of Penang Island in George Town (Two words, not one. This ain't D.C.) right near Gurney Drive, where there is a rather large,  well-established, but touristy Hawker Center. 

For those of you who don't know, Hawker Centers are just areas where food vendors (aka, Hawkers) congregate on a regular basis to sell their fares, usually for cheap. There's communal seating everywhere and it's usually outdoors. 

So imagine if... Smorgasburg and your local mall food court had a baby, but the baby sold cheap, good food that have been done for generations. And instead of rich hipsters posing with a $13 corn on the cob dusted with truffle shavings, it's locals (and sometimes tourists) packed in elbow-to-elbow eating incredibly affordable dishes that are authentic and genuine. 

Don't even try to get offended. You know I'm right.

In my time researching Penang, I read about "Asam Laksa", a rice noodle soup dish that is pretty specific to the region. Now laksa is something you can find all around SE Asia, a spicy curry broth of seafood and coconut milk. There are variations of it, but it's usually the same general idea with either with egg noodles or rice noodles. Sometimes a mixture of both.

Asam Laksa, however, is a local variant of this dish where the soup base is tamarind, mackerel, and lemongrass. The most interesting part? The garnishes:

• Torch Ginger flower (similar to hibis
• Hae Ko (蝦膏), or prawn paste
• Sliced raw onions or shallots
• Cucumber
• Pineapple
• Mint

Your reaction is probably the same as mine. A very confused, interested, but mildly concerned: "Woah?"

Well... It... Yeah. I mean....

"Woah" about sums it up. Because the flavor of this is just insanely intricate and strange and delicate but really magically works together in a combination that I've never even imagined before.

This stall (compared to a different one we tried a few days later) had a particularly dark, thick broth that was a little bit on the heavy side. The whole thing is incredibly tangy and pungent, and you get a distinctly odd mixture of floral and seafood when you smell it.

As for the taste? The creamy fishiness of the soup almost immediately clashes with the mint. But before you've had time to process that combo, your tongue has already started trying to make sense of the sourness of tamarind that melds into the sour crunchiness of the pineapple, which is offset by the crunchy freshness of the cucumber, which is then tied back in by the sweetness of the aforementioned pineapple.

But before you've had time to wrap your head around all of it, you're back to the mint. This time, with a mild hint of floral.

What the holy Galangal.

It. Was. Addictive.

I drank almost 1/3 of the soup before I ate any of the noodles just because I was so intent on making sense of the flavors and how everything was mixing together so perfectly.

But most incredibly of all, this dish was refreshing.

It's paradoxical that a hot, thick, heavy, fishy soup would be refreshing on a hot Penang night, but the freshness of the pineapple and the mint and the cucumber just ends up making the whole thing strangely light and... airy.

Oh also, this bowl cost RM$4.50 (Malaysian Ringgit), which converts to about US$1.10. Yeah.

While I was busy Bobby Fischer-ing over this dish, Tree man was off collecting various other dishes from various stalls like the seasoned Hawker Center veteran he was. And the following are the spoils of war from his conquests:

Oh Cien (蚵煎 ), oyster fry. Small, plump oysters fried up with rice flour batter and garlic. Topped with scallions and a sweet chili sauce on the side.

This is top 3 in my book for everything I've eaten this trip. Don't even know how to describe it. It was just perfect.

Also I don't want to get into it because it was delicious and if I think about it too hard I'm going to get mad that I can't have it now.

Hokkien Mee (福建麵) or Prawn Mee. Prawn noodles in a style from the Chinese province of Fujian. The broth is a shellfish base that famously gets its red color from the heads of the prawn, which also lends an incredibly sweet and rich flavor to the dish.

The garnish - from what I can tell - is a mixture of fried shallots, pork crackling, and dried baby shrimp. It's served also with pork, sliced hard-boiled eggs, copious amounts of white pepper, and a spoon of sweet chili paste for good measure.

I thought this was delicious, but Tree man informed me that it needed more flavor, and that there were better ones to be had. He was later proved right. As usual. (Stay tuned for more in the next blog post)

Grilled skewers of various proteins coated with some sort of sweet sticky sauce. We got chicken, beef, and lamb. Raw onions and cucumbers on the side for accompaniment. Served with a peanut sauce.

This was just okay.

Po Piah (薄餅), thin crepes. Very thin and delicate crepes made from rice flour and wrapped around various ingredients like a sort of burrito. Stuffings can be either sweet or savory, and we got the savory ones stuffed with... rice noodles? I think? There was also some kind of meat, lettuce, and sauce.

I only had one or two. Was honestly food coma-ing already at this point and my memory is a blur.

The final thing we had in the Hawker Center was - of course - dessert.

Apom are tiny little palm-sized pancakes made from fermented rice batter and coconut milk. They're cooked on special griddles with little pancake molds (as below) until one side is slightly caramelized, then they're removed and folded up in half like a tiny little fluffy taco.

A beautiful, sweet, coconut-y, fluffy taco.

You're then given the option to add fillings of either banana, coconut (shreds?), or corn.

For all y'all bigoted small-minded people being like: "EWW WHAAT, CORN IN A DESSERT PANCAKE? THAT'S SO WEIRD" - first off, yes. It's weird. Second off, it's delicious. And it works. It's a small juicy thing that's crunchy and sweet. It works.

Anyways. (After that random outburst about corn) We didn't pick the corn. We opted for the banana and the coconut.

In some act of fun, retroactive karma, we ended up getting the corn ones instead of the coconut ones. Which were really interesting because the corn added a literal pop to the bite, and the sweetness really brought out the richness of the coconut milk.

The bananas were (I think?) sprinkled with sugar, the crunchiness of which helped offset the creaminess of both the bananas and the pancakes themselves.

It was amazing. I would have this every week if a stall existed in Taipei.

After dessert, we popped over to Starbucks for some reprieve from the heat and little icy drink before ambling back to the hotel.

But, in typical Vicky fashion, I...

Got hungry again.

So on our way home, we made one last pitstop for second dinner.

Final contender for this night (and blog post) ciliBilis for Nasi Lemak Ayam Goreng.

Quick language lesson in Malay, courtesy of my boyfriend (and Google):

• Nasi = Rice
• Lemak = Fat (coconut cream or palm cream in this case)
• Ayam = Chicken
• Goreng = Fried

So the dish is, basically put, coconut rice with fried chicken.

It's traditionally served with a hardboiled egg, dried fish, peanuts, cucumbers, and sambal, a red chili paste usually made from shrimp paste, fish sauce, aromatics, and various spices.

It was good, simple food that cost me a whopping RM$7 (US$1.70) and sent me spiraling straight into a carb coma after I'd finished.

All in all, pretty solid first night and a great introduction to Penang. I hope this was an interesting read, and that you guys stay tuned for the other upcoming blogposts about the rest of this trip. Mild spoiler alert, I gained 3 kilos (6 pounds) on this trip. Though to be fair, I think Singapore was at least a quarter responsible for this.

So until the next time.

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Gurney Drive Hawker Center
Address: 172, Solok Gurney 1, Pulau Tikus, 10250 Jelutong, Pulau Pinang, Malaysia

Mon - Sun: 4:30pm – 11:00pm