We decided on a trip to Penang in August with the aim of 'buddy bonding' with our dear friend, Sharon before she leaves for Harvard on a year long scholarship. As everyone had tight schedules, we only had 2 full days to find out if the mythical rumors of amazing food in Penang were true. An hour's plane ride later, five hungry girls, without Sharon got to Penang.
(No we didn't have a "Sharon-not-around-party” - that's perhaps for later? She had a school celebration that day and would only join us the next day)
Instead of renting a MPV first, we made a bee line to the waffle stand in an attempt to satiate our hunger. I had one with kaya filling, Sandra and Charissa both had the chocolate waffle with peanut butter and Endora had one with jam. Mmm, waffles never tasted so good! And that marked a positive start to our eating spree!
We finally found our way to the our hotel after 2 hours of figuring out the roads, and immediately after checking in, we went in search for food (yes the waffles were just a snack!). We circled our hotel area several times in our attempt to 'food hunt' without success, so we decided to explore a little further, and we discovered this quaint "hawker center". Helllooo, variety!!! We ordered so much food that we must have given people the impression that we were only recently released from prison as we were drawing curious stares. Well let them judge as they want - we just want to eat!
We had grilled stingray (YUMS!), belachan fried chicken (a little dry but still yummy), popiah and kueh paiti (so-so), fried oyster omelet (the oysters were seeming larger than our heads; a pity that I don't eat them), 20 sticks of satay (which was not bad), Mae and Sandra each had "ban mian" (Soup was good but the MSG was a little overpowering), Charissa and Endora each had wanton mee and i had Claypot chicken rice. Yes, all in one meal; I'll say we did pretty well for ourselves!
The next morning, we went to the airport to pick Sharon up. While waiting for her to arrive, Sandra and I decided sneak in a bowl of asam laksa. Yes I am aware of the 'fine' reputation of food available in airports, but we were hungry!!! My god, it was soooo bad, possibly the WORST asam laksa I have ever eaten. I practically took only one bite and threw the rest away; the wait time for Sharon was made longer having to cringe over in my head just thinking about how bad the laksa was.
Sharon finally arrived to our A4 sized welcome banner and loud cheers. We made a trip down to Tesco. Yes you read it right - TESCO. My friends wanted to do their 'auntie' thing. Since no other food places were open, we smartly decided that Sharon should also share our bad airport food experience, so we bought ourselves more nasty breakfast in a food court at Tesco. Hehe.
By this time, we were doubting if good food in Penang was merely just a myth, so to straighten things out we headed downtown to a mall on Penang road, for the Asam laksa that Mae's mum swears by (we believe her because she's peranakan:P). But alas!!!!! After go round the mall a few times, we found out that the shop was closed for the day - because the stall owner's maid went home and decided not to open as she couldn't work alone. We decided to settle for something else, and after major pestering from another store owner, who claimed that “we would regret it if we didn't eat his food”, we ordered a plate of cha kuay tiao from him to share. Liar he was! The rest of us went the 'safe way' and had chicken rice and wanton mee, but unfortunately both were disappointments too.
At this point we decided to halt the 'bad food spree', so we went off for a foot massage, However Endora and i felt inspired again, so we left the rest behind and embarked on a 'dao sah pia' hunt. We took a walk to the famous "Him Hiang" and bought 6 boxes of 'dao sah pia', 5 boxes of 'beh teh sor' and a few boxes of kueh lapis. The girls were finally done after an hour or so, and came to pick us up, but they couldn't resist the lure of the snacks and they ended up buying more than several boxes of kueh lapis for themselves too. If I remember correctly - Charissa alone snapped up 8 boxes!
Oh, excuse me! I left out the part where Endora and I chanced upon the famous Penang road Asam Laksa en route to "him hiang", and we persuaded the by now hunger stricken girls back to Penang road to try it out with us. They agreed! The laska was not great but still good! We finally found decent Penang food! Feeling inspired, we topped it up with Rojak, Chendol and a combination of Chendol with Durian. Yay! Assam laksa craving satisfied! Fortunately it didn't end there; we drove to this place called Sunflower Bakery, located near our hotel and bought more cakes and kueh lapis. Absolute madness!!!!
We decided to take a break for a couple of hours, relaxing and testing out 'the spoils' in our hotel room. Hunger stuck again and we soon headed headed out for dinner. Yes, more food! We drove out to look for Teik Seng restaurant, which came highly recommended by my friend KP but it was unfortunately closed – dumb us forgot the time, which was already close to 10pm. Duh! So reluctantly we drove around to search for something else, and found a Bak Kut Teh place, which was nothing to rave about. Endora had western food and ordered a Cha Kuay Tiao to share; both were pretty ok too.
Departure day came and I refused to give up; I insisted we headed back to Teik Seng to try out luck before going home. Not only was it open, we were treated to amazing food!!!! The assam fish was mind blowing!!!! The salted vegetable with duck soup was superb!!! Not too salty and super tasty! We also had their famous kang kong, two types of sotong, their famous pork dish (which unfortunately i didn't really like) and the har chong chicken which was damn good!!! Finally after days of 'misses' WE FOUND A WINNER!!!!!!! In Charissa's words, "Well done Chern Yee!" And thank you KP!!!!
(It was so good i asked the chef if i could pack some assam fish home, totally forgetting about my 100ml liquid limit on the plane, but fortunately I dropped the idea when the chef told us that the fish may not keep well by the time we got back home.)
What an amazing end our Penang food chomping madness. I would willingly march back to Penang just for the zhi char. Ooo.....i am salivating thinking about it now! Anyone wants to join me? Anyone?
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