Holiday Foodsteps: Bali Hai, Penang

It's one of those hard-to-miss places along Gurney Drive, with its larger than life signboard and tiki huts. I've always been curious about the place - the first time I spotted those tiki huts as we drove along Gurney Drive, I assumed it was one of those touristy places. On my most recent visit to Penang, we succumed to the lure of those huts and decided we'd give the place a go.

Bali Hai 

90 Gurney Drive,

Penang 


A huge seafood display greets you as you walk into the restaurant - tanks of live fish and crustaceans, and array of shellfish and other more exotic findings from the sea (Think spider crabs larger than steering wheels). 

 
There's some excitement in getting to pick the ingredients for your meal, especially when there's quite a bit to choose from. I even managed to get a little "lets get to know your fish" session with my dad. The display is quite the crowd pleaser among children (and adults too, clearly).




Steamed jade prawns. We thought we'd go with something simple for the prawns - afterall, what better way to pay homage to fresh prawns than to enjoy them with minimal add-ons. Despite the being succulent and rather juicy, they lacked flavour, something that left me rather disappointed.


Steamed soon hock (marbled goby). Adequately fresh, though I was hoping for a little more with this dish.

Deep fried grouper. The grouper is perhaps my favourite kind of fish and while some may deem deep frying a perfectly good piece of fish a bit of a cop out, there's something about the special soy sauce and ginger that complements the distinct flavour of the grouper.

Black tofu topped with deep fried golden mushrooms. This became quite the conversation topic when it arrived at our table. "But how did they make it black?!". Overall, it was a tasty plate of crispy-ness with the deep-fried tofu being more on the tofu pok end of the tofu scale.


We also had some garlic scallops with our meal which were on the mushy side, unfortunately. I have to say that the meal left me feeling a little dissatisfied - I was expecting seafood of better quality for what they were charging. Perhaps the tiki huts and the fancy display raised the expectations a little too much. As for that initial touristy impression? I'd say I wasn't far off.



I'd warrant a guess that there are better seafood places in Penang that are a little friendlier to the wallet too.  

Holiday Foodsteps: The Little Gems of Ipoh and Penang

 As always, one finds little things that stand-out along the way - they may not be full-blown meals but these little gems command the spotlight (and are often the things we remember most). These are some of my favourite spotlight-stealers:

Sin Eng Heong Kaya Puff

No. 64, Jln Mustapha Al-Bakri,
Jln Clare,30300,Ipoh Perak.

05 2439 659, 012 453 4596 (Elaine)


Orders for the kaya puffs were being taken even before we got to Ipoh - I suppose that should have been a bright, flashing indicator of how good the puffs are. Alas, my family decided to skip on the orders, deciding that we'd be fine without a taste of these much-talked-about kaya puffs. As the packets of warm kaya puffs, fresh from the oven, made their way onto the bus after we stopped by the bakery to collect them, we relented and tucked into some.  The pastry that gives into the delightfully rich kaya concoction is a masterpiece - so light, flaky and crumbly that it surprised me. Devine. Simply devine.

Muar Chee

Gurney Drive Hawker Area
Penang 

This what I've come to know affectionately as the inside-out muar chee. In possibly every other part of Malaysia, muar chee comes in the form of glutinous rice balls with sweet filling (peanut or otherwise), rolled in flour. They've always been a favourite of mine and I have fond memories of tucking into muar chee balls and getting the flour all over my mouth and fingers. When I first stumbled upon this version of one of my favourite snacks, I was intrigued - and how can one not be as you stand in front of the stall watching the lady expertly cut the glutinous rice strips with a blade while simultaneously coating the pieces with what would usually be the peanut filling. Lets just say I fell in love at first bite.



 

Swatow Lane Ice Kacang 

New World Park 

Swatow Lane off Burma Road

Penang

When it comes to hawker food, competition is tough in Penang and while New World Park offers the comfort of a clean, modern setting for hawker food, the food does disappoint somewhat. It is (more than) worth a visit, though, if you're on the hunt for ice kacang. This is perhaps my favourite version of the iconic Malaysian dessert - a treasure trove of the usual suspects (sweetcorn, redbean, jelly, syrup, peanuts), fresh fruits, attap seeds and the most incredible ice cream (one gets a choice of ice cream flavours - durian really stood out for me).

Holiday Foodsteps: Hot Wok, Penang

We thought it would be nice to step away from the chaos that comes with hawker food to sample some Penang Nyonya delights. Having grown up thinking that all grandmothers wore either sarongs or wooden clogs, I've always been a fan of the eclectic mix of flavours that Nyonya cuisine presents and so when we stumbled upon Hot Wok, we thought we'd take a chance.

Hot Wok
124-E & F Jalan Burma
10050 Penang, Malaysia.
Telephone: (604) 227 3368

I love how Nyonya cuisine seems to be a marriage of cultures - Chinese cooking with a dash of Malay-influenced spices.

Inchi Kabin - crispy on the outside and deliciously succulent on the inside, this dish is a childhood favourite. Coupled with the slightly tangy "ang mo tau eu", the Nyonya version of Lea & Perrins sauce, it had such an addictive quality that we ordered seconds.

Assam prawns. Coated with the dark, sticky assam sauce, the prawns were fresh. However, I would have preferred the sauce to be a little less sweet and little more sour.

Gulai tumis - the spicy-sour fish curry that's always a crowd pleaser. With a rather generous amount of brinjals and long beans, this dish goes extremely well with a bowl of steaming hot rice. While the dish had to be sent back the first time for being slightly undercooked, it came back well-cooked and with a nice balance of flavours.

The "Hong Bak", with it's gravy on the slightly thicker side, was quite enjoyable as well, reminding me very much of the version we get at home. Despite the rather large meal, we couldn't resist dessert and our selection of cendol, mango cendol and honeydew sago seemed to be spot on.

With the grandmother and aunts in tow, it was a pretty tough crowd to please but I'd say that Hot Wok managed to hold it's own.

Holiday Foodsteps: The streets of Penang

"Left!"
"Right!"
"No, left!"
"Wait, isn't this Burmah Road?"
"Argh, I knew we should have turned right!"

That's Penang for you, well for us anyway - a maze of roads, too much to eat and too little time. With hopes of leaving the directions to the GPS navigator shattered very early into the trip, we had to rely on the age-old practice of winding down the window to ask for directions from the neighbouring car at each set of traffic lights. It's amazing how many times in a row one can take the same wrong turn - on hindsight, perhaps having 4 women scream directions in the car isn't exactly ideal.

Needless to say, we were an extremely hungry crew by the time we found our hotel and settled on a place to eat. Ah, but the delicious smell of laksa and the sound of the kuey teow being expertly fried was worth every wrong turn.

I've always thought of Penang as the land in which the hawker is king. With stalls that have been around for generations and hawkers whose names my grandmother remembers, it's a matter of getting to the right places to eat, or in our case, trying to stumble upon them. While I will not attempt to advice on the best places to eat in Penang (I expect that much debate goes on about that), I will share with you some of my favourite hawker dishes.

Clockwise from top left - char kuey teow, prawn noodles (or Hokkien mee, in Penang), laksa, loh bak

Char kuey teow is a little lighter in colour in Penang than it is everywhere else in Malaysia but it's lack of colour definitely doesn't translate to a lack of flavour. My brother is a big fan of prawn noodles and after getting over the initial confusion of it being called Hokkien mee in Penang, he promptly gave the Penang version a thumbs up. I'm all for assam laksa as well because really, how can one resist the robust flavours of the tangy broth? I'm a loh bak lover, true and true - the spice-laden pork rolled in crispy beancurd skin, the other little crispy pieces that get piled on top and the slices of century egg that add that extra bit of texture. Dunked into that special sauce, I could have it as a meal on its own.

Clockwise from top left - chee cheong fun, pie tee, sar hor fun, yam cake.

My absolute favourite, however, is the cendol. There's something about the cendol in Penang that is more flavourful - perhaps it's the more generous helpings of gula melaka, or the creaminess of the coconut milk. The cendol and ais kacang never failed, no matter where we went. While not pictured, the muar chee sold in the hawker area along Gurney Drive get's a special mention as well. Penang, with Gurney Drive in particular, was where a 5 year old me first fell in love with the soft, sweet, peanut-y, chewy delight that is muar chee. Cut into tiny pieces, rolled in the peanut-sugar mixture and served warm, it's different from the usual muar chee balls that we tend to get and oh-so-good.

The choices seem endless with everything from oyster omelettes to mee rebus. Decisions are tough and we somehow always ended up with far too much to eat. With that said, it's key to pick the right places to go though as some of the hawker areas aren't the most hygenic of places and the last thing you'd want is for a bout of food poisoning to put a damper on your holiday.

They say that a family that eats together stays together. I think we've definitely got that covered.