Always an adventure for us whenever we hit Kuala Lumpur for its hawker food. Kuala Lumpur’s mainly Cantonese hawker culture sets it very significantly apart from Penang’s Teochew and Hokkien hawker fare. Just as we cannot find any KL-style hawker dishes in Penang for love or money, neither does Penang hawker fare as we know it exists in Kuala Lumpur.
One of KL’s most popular coffeeshops has to be Wah Cheong in Section 17 of KL’s satellite town of Petaling Jaya. The breakfast crowd at Wah Cheong can be pretty daunting, especially on weekends.
The best known stall is the chee yoke fun - pork noodles in soup - but that entails a 30-45 minute wait for one’s bowl of noodles, so we vetoed ordering that from the onset.
Instead, we ordered the other KL-Cantonese pork noodle dish: sam kan cheong - hor fun (flat rice noodles) dressed in a dark soy sauce-based condiment, covered with minced pork, garnished with siu cheong (roasted pork-lard-pork liver sausages), accompanied by a bowl of light pork broth containing quenelles of minced pork. In Penang, I can only dream of this noodle dish:
Wantan mein - KL wantan noodles stand head-and-shoulders above the type we get in Penang, with its superior dressing, and much better quality Cantonese-style BBQ pork (char siu).
The organic chicken here was toothsome, but very flavoursome. Quite good chicken rice - much better quality than those one gets in Penang, but Malaysian Hainanese chicken rice still falls far, far behind the ones in Singapore in terms of taste and aroma.
@klyeoh I was thinking of your breakfast posts this week as I’ve been eating leftover (Teochew-ish) chicken curry noodle soup for breakfast and wondering why I don’t do it more often!
The chicken rice looks good, as does the rest — did they douse the chicken with sauce before serving or did you?
The hawker did. In Malaysia, whether one is in KL or Penang, they would douse the chicken with this dark soy sauce-based dressing before serving. It’s something that often shocks Singaporeans, where only a light dressing made from chicken fat, shallot oil and sesame oil is used.
That sounds a lot better to me, especially given the delicate texture of the chicken.
It was interesting to me when at a cheung fun specialist here they asked me whether I wanted the sauce poured over, because I’ve never been asked that for cheung fun at dim sum. In retrospect, I should have asked for it on the side.
Getting excited in anticipation of eating some of these things in Hong Kong soon!
I was scrolling down to say just that. The wantan mein looks perfect. Though the Sui Kow is not far behind.
Beutiful dishes and outstanding photography, Peter!
