My 2nd full day here in Penang and I finally got into Georgetown. My hotel is 2 km from Penang Airport as I have an early morning departure on January 10th. Thankfully it’s a pleasant 50 minute one way bus trip costing only RM 2.70/USD $0.58 !
I had lunch (sorry to post my lunch, not dinner) in the Little India part of Georgetown at an Indian-Chinese fusion place called “Kafe Jayam”. Besides curry, I’ve not eaten all that much Indian food and I quickly called a friend who lived in Chennai for a few years to confer with her what I should order. We determined it should be Chicken Biryani (other items I wanted were only available at breakfast or dinner…grrr…)
The chicken biryani was served with a curry sauce and a yogurt sauce with shallots in it. As you can see, there was a hard boiled egg as well. The biryani was prepared in a stoneware pot leaving lots of crispy rice bits! It was all so incredibly yummy! I preferred it with the curry sauce rather than the yogurt sauce, but I did eat the yogurt sauce after to cool my palate. Unbelievable, but this cost just RM 13.50/USD $2.90 ! Though the restaurant does have both Indian and Chinese dishes on the menu, I only saw one table with Chinese people…all the other patrons besides me were either from the Indian subcontinent or had ancestry from there. Not only was the food great, the service was exemplary!
Since I normally only eat breakfast and dinner without lunch at all, I brought home a char siu pastry and an egg tart from Innland Bakery for a light dinner in my hotel room. I didn’t expect to eat pork in Malaysia (though I do know it is sometimes available), but it was an excellent pastry and the type of dim sum I crave as it’s basically unavailable in Japan. The char siu pastry was RM 7/USD $1.50 and the yummy egg tart was RM 3/USD $0.65.
Tomorrow is my last day here in Malaysia and I hope to eat some Hainanese chicken rice…Malaysian style!
