Asia's ten greatest street food cities

So here's what I spent most of November and December working on. 9,000 words about 100 street foods in Penang, Taipei, Bangkok, Fukuoka, Hanoi, Singapore, Seoul, Xi'an, Manila and Phnom Penh.
Read more: Asia's 10 greatest street food cities | CNNGo.com

Back to Penang: Hoikken mee twice for lunch

I was about to write a potentially very boring post about how much I love Hokkien mee in Penang, and then I realized that I already wrote that post last March. I'm here for the holidays and harboring fantasies about moving here and spending the rest of my life doing nothing but eating hawker food. George Town is one of the best food cities I've ever been to. Last time I visited I didn't quite appreciate how easily I can communicate here, but after five months in Cambodia I've come to be very grateful when I meet bilingual locals that I can have actual conversations with. The vibrant (and vaguely hygienic) street food scene is made even better by the fact that every street food stand has a sign stating exactly what they sell.

My local food ambassador, Mr. Oon, loves Hokkien mee. Just out of the hospital he tells me that he nearly died, possibly from not having Hoikkien mee for a month. He said his doctor has just given him a clean bill of health and that he's now allowed to eat as much Hokkien mee as he wants (but he still shouldn't drink the soup, too much cholesterol). Of course he can't help but have a few spoonfuls every time. Too delicious, lah.

Today for our four hour lunch we started with the soupy Hokkien mee (above) and finished with Hokkien char mee from a different place with the same plates (below).



I've nothing to say about Hokkien mee that hasn't been said before, but I love that Mr. Oon loves it and made me eat it twice for lunch today. He's also twisted my arm into going for an even better version tomorrow morning.

My favorite part about Penang is that hawker-stalking is a full time job. I don't need to bother sightseeing--I spent all day trolling the streets George Town looking for hawkers on my list of recommendations, buttonholing locals trying to suss out the best curry mee, and walking past the koay teow th'ing place again, hoping they will finally be open. Who needs beaches when you can do this?

In case you thought I forgot about Pocky...

After my run-in with Chinese Pocky I have pretty successfully sworn off the stuff. And although my fascination with this sugary treat has diminished, it has not disappeared. So imagine my delight when I spotted these counterfeit Pocky in Malaysia. I was very pleased imagining how impressed you, my loyal readers, would be with my find.

As it turns out, these aren't fake Pocky, they are real Rocky. Glico markets Pocky as Rocky in Malaysia because in Malay the word puki, pronounced "pooki," means vagina (more vulgar than clinical). So now you know.

I love Penang

Some photos of food in Penang, Malaysia.


Wan tan mee


Koay chiap (that's pigs ears, intestines, giblets, tongue and blood to you)


Si koh soup with red bean, longan, gingko, lotus seed. Chinese crullers and almond soup. I don't know what the real names for these actually are.


"We know your taste better"


Chee cheong fun: rice noodle roll, Penang's version has shrimp paste in addition to the black, sweet chee cheong fun sauce.


Fried oysters


Nyonya kuah (and a nonya).


These sweets were all over the board but had a lot of coconut and pandan flavoring. Yum.

Penang Hokkien Mee

Penang in Malaysia was easily one of the top food cities I've visited on this tour of gluttony I call my life. Halfway through my visit I met a gentleman who had spent most of his 66 years in Penang and had very strong feelings on the local cuisine. He took no time in telling me that I had not been trying hard enough, and clearly needed to try MORE food while I was in town. Obviously always up for a challenge, I agreed. We'll start tomorrow, he said, with Hokkien mee for breakfast.



Hokkien mee is a noodle dish, that although is Chinese in original is found more often in Malaysia. It was brought to Malaysia by Chinese immigrants from Fuijan Province--in fact one of the most used languages in Penang is the Hokkien dialect of Chinese.

I've tried two kinds of Hokkien mee (mee means noodles). The ones I had in Kuala Lumpur were billed as "dry" Hokkien mee, meaning that they aren't in soup.


Dry Hokkien mee at Hong Ngek, 50 Jalan Tun H.S. Lee, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

The dry ones are also sometimes called Hokkien char mee, and are very heavy on the dark soya. Delicious, but it's definitely advisable to stay well hydrated in the aftermath.

Hokkien hae mee (Hokkien prawn noodles) is another name for the wet version that Penang specializes in. I love Hokkien mee! And keeping in tradition with all of my other favorite soups, it's got a hard-boiled egg in it. With egg noodles and rice noodles, juicy pork, prawns, and most importantly, a broth that is well-constructed and an integral part of the dish (made from prawn heads and shells), this is the perfect breakfast food. And good luck getting it for lunch, they've usually run out by 11am.



Of course I was too flustered by the deliciousness of the stuff to write down the address of wherever we went. Sorry, hounds. But there are a lot of very interesting looking recipes online. Anyone want to try one out and report back?

A love letter to laksa

I realized that perhaps I had not adequately conveyed my passion for laksa. I feel as strongly about laksa as I do about ramen, That's how much I love it. And I've been eating a lot of it in Malaysia. I may only have three weeks here, but I am going to make the most of it.

Penang is Malaysia's food capital--I could have stayed there for weeks. There were so many amazing dishes to try (more on that later) that I felt like I gave the laksa less attention than I should have. But for my last breakfast in Georgetown I sought out the curry mee--also known as curry laksa--stand recommended to me by a local and had a giant bowl (above) at 9am. That's one of my favorite parts about traveling around Asia--finally, a place that has something going on for breakfast. I've always hated breakfast until I realized that miso soup, pho and  laksa are all fair game round these parts. Hunching over a steaming bowl of soup that costs around $1, sweating from the heat and the chilis is how I'd like to start every day.



Laksa is one of the signature dishes of Penang and is significantly healthier than it's coconutty brethren. And that's exactly why I thought I wouldn't like it. But how wrong I was. Penang's asam laksa is a sour, fish-based laksa. I'm not a big fish person, but when I actually had a bowl of it in front of me I realized it was flaked mackerel, one of the only fishies that I like due to its incredible fishy properties. It's also chock full of vegetables, something you won't get a lot of if you live on hawker food in Malaysia. Cucumbers, shallots, mint, some other green I was unable to identify, ginger buds and even some pineapple made it a delicious and refreshing choice after days of calorically rich choices.



And finally, here's the one made in London before I went traveling. Perhaps not 100% authentic--it's a very westernized version--but it was more delicious than many that I tried on the street, probably because of the incredibly expensive ingredients (damn you, Waitrose) and the extra coconut cream. The fact that I only owned a tiny mortar and pestle made it an incredibly laborious process, but once that I repeated several times over the course of August and leading to a much plumper outlook on life.

Melaka Nyonya Laksa

Laksa is another one of the reasons I went traveling. I had Malaysian laksa for the first time in London, and immediately fell in love. How could I not? It's so grossly decadent. Why settle for coconut milk when you can triple the calories and use coconut cream?

I started cooking it myself, and I'm not going to pretend that it wasn't delicious. But it was definitely a very western version. Not enough shrimp paste, not enough excitement. I knew I needed to try it in its natural environment. The way other people want to see the pyramids, I wanted to see the laksa.

Melaka is a city in Malaysia that has very distinct dishes, often referred to as nyonya cuisine. Nyonya and Baba are wham women and men that are the product of mixed Chinese and Malaysian backgrounds are called. I've also heard nyonya used to describe women of Chinese descent that are culturally Malaysian in language and dress. Melaka had the first permanent Chinese settlement in Malaysia and as such, has the strongest Baba-Nyonya culture. The food combines the best of Chinese and Malaysian food and has resulted in my favorite laksa so far, that the locals call laksa lemak.

It's very similar to curry laksa--or curry mee--but has the addition of lots of cucumber, which has the unfortunate distinction of being my favorite vegetable. (Does this make me a total sap?) Laksa lemak also has fish cake and even more calories, if that's possible, than regular curry laksa.

This bowl, filled with tofu puffs, hard boiled egg, cockles, shrimp, cucumber, bean sprouts, shallots and fresh herbs in a curry gravy was eaten mid-day in 100 degree weather and left me panting and with burning lips. Sweating and exhausted, I was happy.

Laksa lemak, I love you.

Would you like kidney beans with your iced dessert?

Popular dessert in Malaysia: cendol. Cendol is a shaved ice dessert that is doused in coconut milk, pandan flavored green noodles, kidney beans and palm sugar. Other variations include grass jelly, red beans, durian, glutinous rice and the one that most foreigners gag when they try, creamed corn. Mine came with a healthy serving of chocolate syrup. 

Malaysians aren't the only ones that like beans in their iced desserts--you can find variations on this in Singapore, Vietnam and Indonesia.

In the Philippines I had an even more intense version called halo-halo that included garbanzo beans, ube (purple yam) ice cream, condensed milk, mung beans and about a half dozen other unidentified ingredients. It was delicious but definitely has a bit of the wtf factor--I was on a beach eating this delicious dessert and then suddenly I'd remember it was filled with beans. Easy way to get your five-a-day, though.