Visitors, Culture, Eating and ....

I've been lazy in the past few weeks when it comes to writing my blog. For sure we had some visitors... actually quite a lot of visitors, then we moved house, then there was the big tennis tournament that I played in when Viv was away, then I hurt my back .... and then came the coronavirus which has locked us down in out apartment for at least the next two weeks.

Yes, I just slipped that last thing in. My goodness, this is the biggest crisis facing the world probably since WWII and to think I was going to write about the hardships of going out to eat in Penang!

But I'd started and had some really neat photos so I will go ahead and complete the blog but obviously with the benefit of current thinking. Realistically sitting here in our apartment, I would obviously love to go out to restaurants and stuff but that can't happen for a while. I'm still amazed how quickly all this has taken to come to pass when it was only just last week...

Anyhow, here it is:

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I think we've lived here long enough that the Penang coolaid that we've drunk is starting to take effect. Penang info front and centre always says that Penang is the foodie capital of (1) Malaysia, (2) the Far East, or (3) the world. I don't know about that but recently in some periodical or another (or maybe a Far East food programme on TV), it was announced that either Penang or Malaysia (can't remember which) has 162,000 small holding food sellers.... a better word was used but you can't really call fooderies here 'restaurants' because most aren't. For sure there are restaurants like you'd recognise in the west but they are realistically few and far between. You have boutique fancy restaurants too. Then you go to the non-fancy restaurants that are more like US diners and a couple of further rungs down you get to the hawkers and the guys that prepare food off trolleys (you can't call them trucks). Anyway there's 162,000 of these apparently either up and down the country or in Penang, probably up and down the country now that I think of it.

Hawker centre on Beach Street

It feels like we've visited them all this last week.

Also by some extraordinary combination of events, we have had some of the most stunningly good meals and dishes that we've eaten in the entire time we have been here. So you can't say no to eating them, can you? (That was pretty lame, wasn't it? Even so, 100% true).

We had guests in the shape of Viv's mum, Anna, and uncle Dick from San Francisco so were in tourist mode as well so visited some pretty interesting places too but I'll just keep to the food on this post.

After the obligatory chicken rice on collecting Dick from the airport, we went on a bit of a tour ending up at a local Malay Nonya Indian sort of 'fusion' restaurant which had recipes from all over the region. Called Jawi Restaurant, the chef told us that his people are Indian muslims that came to Penang 200 years ago bringing with them traditional dishes that they made with local ingredients, substituting as needed and intermarrying over the years which brought different ways and means to the cooking. Its in Armenian Street opposite the Sun Yet Sen Museum and was very nice.

Our friends Ted and Lisa had asked us all out to join them at a Teochow restaurant called Goh Swee Kee, a fish restaurant and yet another style of Chinese cooking from the Teochow region. Wonderful fish, amazing pork curry and those veggies!!

Viv's tennis buddy asked us (Viv, Dick, Anna and I) for a day trip that included Dim Sum in Butterworth and another fish restaurant on the beach at Batu Ferringhi where the specialty was Duck and Yam Soup. Talk about hearty!

I took Dick out for a walk around Georgetown that included breakfast and of course lunch. Along the way we found the famous Nasi Lemak stall on Beach Street and some amazing looking tandoori chicken in Little India on Chulia Street.

Banana Leaf, rice cooked with coconut milk (hence fatty or 'Lemak'), dried anchovies, hard boiled egg and a huge dollop of chilli out of those buckets makes Nasi Lemak (aka fatty rice), a spectacular breakfast dish.

We realised that we'd not taken our visitors to any Nyonya Restaurants in Penang. Nyonya are the local Chinese/Malay mix cuisine restaurants. I love the food and Ted and Lisa again found a wonderful place called Aunty Geik Lean's Old School in Georgetown. I'd walked past this place dozens of times and never realised I should have stepped in for the fish and indescribably good pork curry.

Then there was the 'quiet' dinner at the Penang Swim Club and the huuuuge Korean BBQ that we went to with our friend's daughter, Hannah...

I felt like a balloon at the end of all this.