Great Delight Kitchen is perhaps Penang’s most under-rated Chinese restaurant - a small, inconspicuous eatery along a row of townhouses on Phuah Hin Leong Road which produces an eclectic mix of Chinese regional dishes, all of which punched above their weight in terms of flavours delivered.
We decided to have our Christmas Day dinner here, rather than risk facing the crowds at Penang’s more well-known, popular restaurants like Maple Gold, CRC Restaurant or Fong Wei Heong, which would probably also require a week’s advance booking.
Great Delight Kitchen’s menu always seem to have too many dishes that we wanted to try on any given visit. Our dinner choices this evening:
- Assam pedas Red Snapper - this is a classic Penang-Chinese dish, a result of its centuries-old fusion of Chinese and Malay cooking techniques and ingredients. “Assam” means ‘sour’ in Malay, and “pedas” means ‘spicy’, so it’s basically a sour-spicy fish stew, cooked using a whole local white-fleshed red snapper. Only the Chinese in South-east Asia utilises so much herbs in their cooking, a testament to their 400-year presence in this tropical region, where native cooking styles (Siamese and Indonesian) have been assimilated by the Chinese.
The “assam pedas” gets its tongue-searing spicy flavours from an almost-shocking amount of chili paste, and sourness from slices of the acidic tamarind fruit (called “assam gelugur” or “assam keeping” in Malay). The stew gets its fragrance from onions, blue ginger (Malay: “lengkuas”), lemongrass (Malay: “serai”), torch ginger (Malay: “bunga kantan”) and kaffir lime leaves (Malay: “daun limau purut”). Tomatoes are added for an extra sour-sweet slant, and okra to slightly thicken the stew (almost akin to gumbo).
The red snapper are cut up and added to the stew at the last minute, and served just cooked: possible in Penang where the fish is usually so fresh, it was probably still swimming this morning.
- Guangdong Da Liang fried fresh milk - we had to have this as it was the first time I’d seen “fried milk” on a menu in Penang. 30-40 years ago, we had fried milk - more like soft curds, batter-fried - in New Mayflower Restaurant in London Chinatown every time we visited the city. A dish which originated from Shunde district of Foshan City in Guangdong province, Southern China, it does not exist in Singapore, then as now! We “may” come across this dish if we happen to chance upon any restaurant which specialises in Shunde (the Cantonese called it “Shun Tak”) cuisine in Hong Kong.
Over here at Great Delight Kitchen, the chef combined the batter-fried milk curds with fresh crabmeat, braised the whole concoction and crowned it with a generous scattering of toasted pine-nuts. It’s served on a bed of crisp-fried rice vermicelli for an added textural dimension.
-
Lion’s head dumplings - this is a classic minced pork dish originating in Eastern China, and very common in Shanghai. The version here is the stewed one (the other is served in a soup).
-
Bitter-gourd with salted duck’s eggyolk - another popular Chinese-Malaysian/Singaporean restaurant dish that’s become ubiquitous in many a family dinner table. The version at Great Delight Kitchen is one of the better ones I’d tried, either in Malaysia or Singapore. The bitter-gourd had been salted and drained, before being batter-fried till golden & crisp, then wok-fried with mashed duck’s egg-yolk, chilis, curry leaves.
This was certainly one of the better Chinese restaurant meals I’d had in Penang, which is better-known for its hawker/ street food than its restaurant food, in general.
Address
Great Delight Kitchen
29, Phuah Hin Leong Road
George Town, 10050 Penang
Tel: +6042189503/+60102199503
Operating hours: 11.30am-10pm daily, except on Saturdays.
