Fellow Hungry Onion and ex-UK Chowhound, @ds , is in town. We did a street food crawl yesterday evening, covering:
- No. 5 Char Koay Teow on 94 MacAlister Road. Opening hours: 12 noon to 10pm Mon to Sat. Closed on Sundays.
The absolute classic Penang street food dish: flash-fried flat rice noodles in lard and garlic, seasoned with a tasty blend of soy sauce-fish-sauce and other condiments. Garnishings included blood cockles, prawns, beansprouts, chives, Chinese sausages and duck egg.
The rendition here is one of the top 5 tastiest versions we’d come across here in Penang.
The house special side-dish, called “Chung Ling Eggs” - a nod to the owner-chef’s alma mater, Chung Ling High School, where the school cafeteria served the aforementioned scrambled egg dish, seasoned with fish sauce.
- Kimberley Street Koay Chiap on 135 Kimberley Street. Opening hours: 1pm to 10.30pm daily, except Thursdays (Closed).
This is the classic Teochew soupy noodle dish which utilises the thick, wide, hand-cut koay chiap (spelt kway chap in Singapore, and guay jab in Thailand).
Here, the noodles are steeped in a deep-flavored, lightly herbal broth made from duck and pork-bones. A standard bowl of koay chiap will contain the thick noodles, sliced braised duck-meat, pig’s intestines, duck-liver, pig’s ears, soy-braised egg, chopped Chinese parsley, golden-fried garlic, pig’s blood pudding, and an assortment of soy-braised offal.
Absolutely the best-tasting bowl of soup noodles this side of the universe.
- Mother-and-Son Wantan Noodles* on 2 Carnarvon Street. Opening hours: 4pm to 10.30pm daily, except Mondays (Closed).
Cantonese-style wheat noodles, tossed in a lard-soy sauce-oyster sauce dressing. The garnishing here are: char siew (Cantonese-style BBQ pork), poached wantan dumplings (with minced pork-shrimp filling), deep-fried wantans (typical to Penang), blanched choy sum greens, and a generous scattering of golden-fried lardons.
I normally avoid Cantonese street food in Penang, which has distinctive Teochew and Hokkien culinary traditions, but this stall has the best-tasting wantan noodles in town, and is actually pretty good.
But its char siew resembles those anemic versions one gets in Singapore and Malacca, where the street food is also dominated by Hokkien or Teochew hawkers. Kuala Lumpur remains the top spot in this region for wantan noodles and char siew.
We don’t see the “Mother” nowadays anymore, but only the “Son”, Ong Chee Keong, who still produces the tastiest plate of wantan noodles in town.
