Langkawi - Restoran Selera Padang Puteh

Another place I found via google maps, but had confirmed by a local as a "good spot" (this time, a grab driver). Selera Padang Puteh is a breakfast/lunch place - we went for both.

First up, lunch. The restaurant is primarily a buffet - you take what you want, and they charge you based on what you've taken. The options were a bit overwhelming. We ended up with one plate with fish balls, braised egg, and beef rendang.

The other plate heaped with fish, two types of chicken curry, potatoes, and eggplant. They had both a regular sambal, and another with ikan bilis in it.

Everything was really good, and it was a very pleasant place to eat, so we came back another day for breakfast.

Breakfast was a similar affair, with a buffet that overlapped with the lunch offerings, but with some different items. We got a plate with some fried chicken and rice with a gravy from a few of the dishes.

They do roti in the morning, so we ordered a roti pisang - roti canai with banana cooked in it, served with condensed milk.

And a couple of half-cooked eggs.

Great local restaurant - the kind of place that would be in our regular rotation if we lived here.

George Town - Nasi Lemak at McDonald's

Every once in a while, it's fun to stop into a familiar fast food joint overseas and see what different items they might have. Finding ourselves a bit hungry at the Penang airport with time to kill and limited options, we checked out the local McDonald's.

We ordered nasi lemak, which turned out to actually be pretty good. The chicken was moist, and deliciously seasoned. The rice was also good, and it came with the requisite egg, cucumber and ikan bilis. Not too shabby at all.

Goerge Town - Belacan Fried Chicken and Hai Koay Teow Soup

Doing my research on George Town, I'd read that Kimberly Street was *the* food street. While that may have once been the case, it now is fairly subdued - with more active street food areas in other parts of the city. Still, there was good food to be found there, and one evening we stopped in to try a few things.

First we got some fried chicken from the "Belacan Fried Chicken" stand. "Belacan" means "shrimp paste" - not sure if that was supposed to indicate a flavoring for the chicken? I didn't taste shrimp, but the seasoning was super good, and the chicken was moist and piping hot out of the fryer.

Right across the street, Hai Koay Teow Soup was doing brisk business.

We snagged one of the last free tables and put an order in. Looking around there were lots of others sitting waiting for food. They meticulously put out bowl after bowl and we were finally rewarded with ours.

Well worth the wait. Full of goodies. Rice noodles, fish balls, fish cakes, pork slices, liver slices, minced pork...

Great bowl of noodles.

George Town - Nasi Melayu Kak Ema

This is a familiar sight all across Malaysia - banana-leaf wrapped cones pre-made and ready to be purchased to take away.

Nasi Melayu Kak Ema was tucked along the side of a street we frequently took when walking to and from our hotel. Needing something for breakfast one morning, we stopped in.

The contents of these parcels are almost always very similar to this:

Nasi lemak with sambal, ikan bilis, and a bit of hard-cooked egg.

We could eat this on a regular basis - and it's no wonder that many Malaysians do.

We also got some sweets to go.

The green ones were pandan-flavored, both with sweet fillings. The other had custard inside.

George Town - Restoran Nasi Padang Minang

We'd had a lot of the "nasi" variations so far on this trip, but we'd yet to try nasi padang (named after Padang, in West Sumatra).

This place was serve yourself from a large buffet of dishes. They had lots of good looking fish, so we concentrated on that.

Including their speciality, which was this fried fish with a ton of shallot. The shallots were actally the highlight on this dish - smokey and a bit sweet, we used them as a nice condiment for the rest of our meal.

The smaller fish were, as you would expect, a bit of labor of love to separate flesh from bone, but worth the effort.

In addition to the fish, we got some veg and this big chunk of tofu, which had a really nice texture. The various sauces were all delicous.

Overally, a really tasty lunch in a friendly setting.

George Town - Pitt Street Koay Teow Soup

Koay Teow Soup seems to be a bit of a George Town thing. We love all sorts of noodle soups, so it was a must try for us.

When we arrived at Pitt Street Koay Teow Soup, there was a line snaking out the front of the place, with a couple of guys working hard slinging bowls of soup.

Koay teow soup is of those those "more interesting that it looks" dishes. Clean and simple in its presentation, the bowl packed a lot of flavor. Tasty broth, nicely cooked koay teow noodles (wide rice noodles), with lovely soft-yet-springy fish balls and juicy slices of pork.

The atmosphere was very active, with servers bustling around calling out to each other. Not a place for a relaxing lunch, but perfect for what we were looking for.

Malacca - Hotel breakfasts and snacks

Our hotel in Malacca (Heeren Palm Suites) put on a very nice breakfast spread. They did eggs to order, and most mornings one or both of us had some half-cooked eggs with white pepper and seasoned soy sauce. We first had eggs this way in a kopitam in Singapore, and it has been a breakfast favorite of ours ever since.

They also had a small buffet of interesting dishes that varied each morning we were there. They also had some sort of rice poridge each morning. The first day, we both loaded up on veg since our recent diet had been a bit lacking in that department. They also had a chicken curry and a mee goreng.

Another morning they had a different kind of chicken dish and a squid and fish cake dish that was delicious.

And yet another morning, they had nasi lemak (coconut rice) with peanuts, ikan bilis and sambal.

Each day they also had other snack items which we took to go. The first morning was a plate of various local kuih treats.

One was sticky rice stuffed with a palm sugar filling.

The pretty stamped one was probably the least interesting tasting. Not sure what the filling was.

The fried one was, I think, a kuih bakul - though very different tasting from the one we had in KL.

The cone-shaped one was a kind of pulut tai tai (blue glutinous rice cake) - very traditional in the region. It was very light and laced with coconut. Probably our favorite of the bunch.

Malacca - Capitol Seafood

We had dinner one night at Capitol Seafood - one of several seafood stalls down an alley off of Jalan Bunga Raya in Malacca.

The speciality is small shellfish (cockles, clams, snails).

Our favorites of the shellfish were the cockles - dark-fleshed and nice and strong flavored. Even better dipped in the provided sauce which had a mixture of saltiness, acidity, umami and heat.

We also really like the smal clams - nice, clean flavor.

The snails were quite pretty, and they were fun to eat (you suck on one end to loosen it, and then on the other end to pull them out). They didn't taste like much, though.

We weren't huge fans of the squid (sotong). It mostly just was a textural component, without much actual flavor.

We also ordered a small plate of rojak. It was our first time having this dish, and we really enjoyed it. This version had tofu skin, fish cakes, and pinapple topped with a couple of sauces (one sweet and one savory) with a splash of sambal on the side.

Another vendor came by selling otak-otak (fish cakes steamed in banana leaves) and we couldn't resist getting a couple. They were very good.