Sunday, April 7, 2013

Backpacking to Penang part 2

Here is the second post about Penang. Yeah,  it's kinda late.Cause last month I had so many activities to do.

Food Hunt
From the travel book that Bang Ooc (My backpacking company) bought, we saw list of foods that might be tried. My classmate, Joel also gave me itinerary plan which consist of some famous restaurants in Penang that I can visit. Bang Ooc, Bang Ali, and I managed to try all of them, unfortunately some Chinese foods in the list which are non-halal.
Penang is very famous with its street food. During night and day we can see a lot of people sell the foods with considerably cheap price. Mostly what I found out in Georgetown, the foods are Chinese food. Well, I am ok with any kind of foods but it must be halal :)
To prevent any non-halal foods, we always asked before we try the foods. It took time for us to find the "right" foods. We went around Georgetown to find foods. These are the foods we eat there :

Nasi Kandar Beratur

As I read about Nasi Kandar, it's originally from Penang Island. When I tasted it slightly has Indian food influence because of the taste of the curry. 
The restaurant "Nasi Kandar Beratur" is very wellknown in Penang. It has been operating since 1943. "Beratur" in bahasa Melayu means "Queue'". Just like the name, we must queue to get our food. This restaurant only open at 10 pm. Can you imagine, you have to wait till 10 pm to get nasi kandar and wait for another minutes for queuing. But don't worry you deserve very good food after all. We can choose many dishes offered here. I heard from some people, the special dish here is the fish egg, so i gave my try. Then I also tried shrimp with lady fingers. Do not worry about the price, you can get it about RM 8 - RM 15 I think. Depends on how many dishes you get.

The next morning, we were so hungry but we try to find halal foods that we can eat. We remembered that someone we met in Nasi Kandar Restaurant said that we can try "Jeruk". Well, it's kinda awkward for us as Indonesians, because Jeruk in Bahasa Indonesia means Orange. But never mind, we hunted this food. We were kinda surprised knowing that Jeruk is actually fruits pickle which we call as "Asinan Buah" in Indonesia. it looks so colorful and nice. But, it seems like it's sour. Because it's still in the morning, we were afraid that we could get stomachache. So we tried to find another foods.


Not far from the "Jeruk Pak Ali"-the name of the shop- we found "Penang Road Famous Theochew Chendul Ice Kacang". The name is so long eh? hahaha. This is another "must try" food that we saw in the travel book and it's halal. We got some Chenduls. Well, we can find it in Indonesia as Cendol. The restaurant actually  has 2 main menus of drink, Ice Kacang (Ice with various kind of beans) and Chendul. Me and friends ordered both and shared the drink together. We got served in a small restaurant and it has another Penang Food to be served and luckily it's halal. Because the one who cooks the food is Indonesian too. OMG I can find a lot of Indonesians in Malaysia and even similar the foods. My friend ordered Laksa Penang. It has a lot of veggies and fruits inside. Served with thick fish soup with laksa (like mee but made by rice). I really love this laksa. Bcz I love seafood, veggies, and fruits. My friends said it's too sour and fishy. But I enjoyed eating it. Bcz right after I went back to KL, I've tried a lot of Laksa in different restaurants but still can't defeat the one in Penang. Hahaha.




On the next day, we hung out to the northern part of Georgetown which is facing the sea. There is Fort Cornwalles as the tourist attraction. Then we can find a food court in front of the Fort. We ordered different halal chinese foods + coconut shake. I think the coconut shake here is not as good as the one I had in Melaka.


We continued our food hunting to Little India. Almost the same as Chulia Street, in Little India we can see a lot of restaurants and street foods. But the special thing here all is about India. We stopped in some Street Restaurants and tasted varieties of Indian cakes.

Basically, we tried some other foods and I managed to take some pictures of random street foods in Georgetown. Here they are....










3 comments:

  1. Thank you, Yaz, for your informative post about Penang :) I'm headed up there alone in a couple of days, without much of a plan, except to try to catch some stuff at the Georgetown Arts Festival!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You're most welcome. I am so glad to find my blog is useful. Have fun! :)

      Delete
  2. uve got an informative source here. but mind to share ur estimation cost on this trip? i know its been a while and im so glad if u could remember. thankyou

    ReplyDelete