Malaysian Hawker Stalls

Mom heard about some Hawker Stalls outside of our hotel in Penang and we decided to be brave and eat there. Why is it brave? Malaysian Street Food is famous the world over, but it's also known that your stomach takes a while to adjust to street food here. We were told we had to wait a month before eating Hawker food. We waited a few weeks. My parents, Patrick and Brendan only waited a few days.

The "Long Beach" stalls backed onto the beach, with stunning sunsets at night. All of the stalls surrounded a covered courtyard. Here's how you'd order: You'd go up to any stall -- the Assam Laksa soup stall, the Singapore fried noodle stall, or the Pancake Queen stall, for example, you'd place your order, they'd ask your table number, then they'd deliver the food, then you'd pay.

We all became such big fans of the "Singapore" stall that the stall chef actually said to Mom on our third night there, "Singapore again? You need try something new." Properly humiliated, we ventured to different dinners but we stuck with the same dessert every night -- Pancake Queen's pancake with fruit and ice cream on top (Grif preferred chocolate pancake with chocolate sauce). You assume you've had this before, right? No, you haven't! There's some magic to that pancake -- more fried, more butter, more something mysterious we haven't put our fingers on. But, each time the hawker's young son delivered the pancake and demanded his money, we didn't ask any questions.

The whole meal would cost each of us no more then $3 to $5.

Yesterday in Kuching in Malaysian Borneo, we hit another set of hawker stalls called "Top Spot," this one "higher end," meaning we paid as much as $6 each for our meal. In this one, we'd go up to the seafood stall and choose our fish, our lobster, our shrimp, ourselves! I even hand-picked the vegetables. Then we told them how we wanted them cooked -- lobster grilled with "bbq sauce," veges with oyster sauce, our grouper fish dubbed "Spottie" with garlic and ginger sauce. My god, it was so delicious that Ken had a smile pasted on his face the entire time, rare for a cynical New Yorker.