JALAN

Jalan is what you call a street or road in Malaysia.

You can also say jalan jalan, which is a verb, meaning “to stroll” or “to hang out and have a nice time,” and is what my mom says to my dad when she takes his arm and wants to amble around on a nice, clear night.

In Penang, Malaysia, the jalans seem to be paved with food. This both makes sense and doesn’t: The temperature hovers at a haunting 80-plus degrees year round, meaning it’s too hot to eat inside though it is also, actually, too hot to eat outside. There are cooks everywhere, standing over hot woks and huge broth pots, barking an unfamiliar Chinese dialect (it’s Hokkien) while dispatching plate after same-looking plate as though they’ve been doing it forever—and many of them have.

All food is fast food in Penang: If you’re ordering to go, drinks come in plastic bags outfitted with a piece of raffia to hang from the handlebars of your scooter; rice comes in banana leaves or newspaper packets. Noodles are bagged and soups are too. If you’re eating “in,” you’re still eating outside or half outside, and you’re expected to eat fast, then go on to eat the next thing — fast. Colorful melamine plates and bowls and chopsticks get washed in huge buckets, and dirty dishwater spills into the streets.

The only rule: Do not fret about where to find “the best.”

Street food in Malaysia — and especially in Penang — can be overwhelming: the abundance, the no-nonsense-ness, the speed. There are hawker stalls on small streets, on big streets, hawker centers outside and inside of coffee shops. One comforting fact: the same foods repeat themselves everywhere, reliably. Wherever you are in Penang, you can usually find the entirety of Malaysian street food on offer. The scenarios in which you’ll encounter these foods repeat themselves, too. Once you stop fretting about where you’ll find the best, you’ll begin to see the patterns emerging from the shrimp-paste-covered chaos, and the cornucopian abundance becomes a very enjoyable problem to tackle.

After being named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2008, George Town, in northeast Penang Island, now attracts leggy blonde tourists from Australia and New Zealand who’ll be out late at night, drunk al fresco. This does not change the fact that the city is a bunch of falling-apart low-rise buildings that date back to British colonization. The stores always appear to be closed, and the place would be a ghost town if it weren’t for the liveliness of the streets and food carts, which are everywhere.

1. Assam Laksa (Rice Noodles in Fishy Soup)

This is assam laksa from a stall on Weld Quay, a busy waterfront street in George Town. It is my favorite food in the whole world: rice noodles in a fishy soup soured with tamarind. The pink things are ginger flowers; the green things are bird’s-eye chilies and cucumber matchsticks. At this particular stall, you’re seated just a few feet from traffic; motorcyclists will ride right up and order their laksa to go.

2. Rojak (Fruit and Vegetable Salad)

Here’s rojak: a plate of cut-up fruit and other miscellany (sometimes squid! sometimes little fried pieces of dough!) with a bunch of brown-black savory-sweet sauce dumped all over it. This sauce is a mystery to me; all I know is that it has shrimp paste in it. If shrimp paste on top of fruit sounds insane to you, it does to me, too. Here’s the thing, though: IT IS TREMENDOUSLY DELICIOUS.

3. Roti Canai (Flatbread)

The line between restaurant and street food gets fuzzy here. The roti canai stand on Jalan Transfer is as street as street food gets, but there’s also a row of stools and vinyl-tableclothed tables in case you’d like to dine in. An assembly line of guys with fun eighties-era hairdos form the roti canai, a flat, flaky bread that’s most often eaten dipped into curry for breakfast. One guy is twisting and slapping and layering the dough with ghee; others cook the bread on a wok. A couple guys are tending to the truly massive drums of curry. Add a little glass mug of hot Nescafé — stir to incorporate the centimeter or so of condensed milk that’s hanging out at the bottom— for a complete Penang breakfast.

4. Chendul/Cendol (Cold Dessert Soup)

You can find chendul/cendol, a sort of cold dessert soup, on Penang Road, a tiny road just large enough for a single car to drive slowly through. Chendul refers to the green Jello-ish squiggles, made from mung-bean flour and stained green with pandan, the leaves of a tropical plant that taste sort of like vanilla. The squiggles, along with red beans, float in a soup of santan, coconut milk, and palm sugar. The soup is ladled over a big lump of ice, and condensed milk goes all over that. It’s served with a spoon but the spoon is unnecessary.

5. Apom Balik (Stuffed Pancake)

Apom balik is a sticky rice-flour pancake with creamed corn(!) inside. This vendor at Tan Jetty spoons corn straight from the can into the cooking batter—eggy and fluffy—then deftly extricates the whole thing and folds it over like a loose taco, a shape that makes it possible to get both crispy edge and sticky interior in a single bite.

6. Batu Maung Satay (Grilled Meat on Skewers)

At night, little lanes like Lorong Baru are dense with hawker stalls. Here, Batu Maung satay — marinated pieces of chicken, pork, or beef on bamboo skewers — are grilled, and served with cucumber chunks and raw white onion for spearing according to your preference. Not included: the goopy peanut sauce that comes on the side of every order of satay in America, because the meat’s already been sauced.

7. Koay Chiap (Duck and Noodle Soup)

Kimberly Street is sleepy in the daytime but, like the nocturnal stink badger of western Malaysia, active at night. The most bustle surrounds two dudes in backward hats and aprons at a stand dishing out koay chiap, an offal-y dark soup of duck meat shreds, gizzards, coagulated blood, a soy-sauce-boiled egg, and curled-up scrolls of rice noodles. Chinese celery bits imbue a nice herbiness.

8. Chee Cheong Fun (Rice-Noodle Rolls)

This is chee cheong fun, which is similar to the rice-noodle rolls you get stateside at dim sum restaurants, but not quite the same. In Penang, it comes with a little bit of chili sauce and a black, sweet, shrimpy sauce that’s gluey with maltose.

9. Lok Lok (Hot Pot)

Padang Brown is one of Penang’s older hawker centers; around since the sixties, it comprises two very long rows of stalls, shaped like a laurel of wheat. It’s outdoors, but the stalls and many, many tables are covered; unlike street vendors, these sellers have permanent spots rather than roll-away carts. In the middle of Padang Brown, between the opposing curved rows, there’s a playground and a memorial to David Brown, a Scotsman and Penang landowner and namesake of the place.

Here you can get lok lok, which means “dip dip.” There’s a boiling hot pot in the center of your table that you lower sticks of stuff (vegetables, tofu, seafood) into; the stick colors indicate price, and at the end of the meal your sticks are tallied and you’re charged accordingly.

10. Ice Kacang (Corn-Bean Frozen Dessert)

New World Park is a newish hawker center off Swatow Lane. Because there’s too much traffic for tiny Penang, the government is taking Singapore’s lead and trying to move vendors to covered hawker centers. A lot of the hawkers who used to sell outside on Swatow Lane were moved to New World Park. The center resembles a mall food court: stations with clean chopsticks, a place to stack your trays, and standardized signage that tells you, plainly, who’s selling what.

Lee Eng Lai is sixty-three and sells ice kacang here. His family has sold ice kacang on Swatow Lane since 1923; they relocated to New World Park when it opened in 2008. The recipe is the same as it always was, but now they have an electric ice-shaving machine. Ice kacang is kind of like a banana split, but in place of bananas there’s corn, kidney beans, and mysterious translucent toothsome jellies. And instead of ice cream there’s shaved ice, topped with a pink syrup that just tastes pink, not in a synesthetic way, but like you’d imagine — like bubble gum. And there’s also, of course, condensed milk all over everything. If you want to gild the kacang, you can add a scoop of ice cream on top of all that.

That is all folks...

#GGWP

After all those meals and then you know you broke af....