We popped into Sri Ananda Bahwan’s oldest outlet on Penang Island for breakfast this morning. We’d previously usually patronized its larger, newer MacAlister Road branch.
This older branch in Penang’s Little India is more atmospheric. In fact, the whole neighborhood around it felt like a small South Indian town - it’s like stepping into the pages of R.K. Narayan’s “Malgudi Days”.
The must-have masala thosai, with spiced potato filling, and served with a very tasty sambhar, perfectly-executed white coconut chutney and chili-spiked kara-chutney. Sheer perfection.
Roti canai (Malaysian paratha) - very fluffy and crisp here. This is simply one of the best we’d come across in Penang, a city with literally hundreds of roti canai purveyors.
Upuma - I love this dish, but the drier, grainier rendition here does not quite suit me. I prefer the version served at Woodlands, a vegetarian restaurant which is located diagonally across the street from Sri Ananda Bahwan.
Fried rice vermicelli - no one does this dish as well as Sri Ananda Bahwan: same taste profile as its upuma, i.e. cooked in ghee, with tempered mustard seeds, shallots, curry leaves, long beans, carrots, and a scattering of yellow lentils, it was light but very tasty.
I prefer my upma dry to soggy, though not grainy (not enough liquid), just fully fluffed but not drowned
I have loved sev upma since I was first introduced to it in Hyderabad when I was 12 or thereabouts. It’s much less common at home around the country, even though regular upma has become a household dish across regions.
Yes, and also what one grew up with. My mom likes it wetter now than she used to make it, and my cousin likes it positively dripping – I can’t eat it when she makes it .
(My Tamilian friends here make it the way I grew up eating it, though, so there may be regional changes that happened away from origin too. Same happens with sheera / halwa / kesari, which is the sweet equivalent using the same ingredients.)
Precisely! Just as the Malaysian roti canai/paratha is nothing like the ones we find in Tamil Nadu, but virtually identical to the Malayali ones from Kerala, even though 90% of Malaysia’s 2.4 million Indians are Tamils.
It’s exactly the same in Singapore, where the Tamils are also the overwhelming majority amongst the local Indian populace, but Singaporean roti prata is identical to its Malayali counterpart.
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