Getting My Malaysian On in Chinatown

Philadelphia’s Chinatown has been a favorite dining location of mine since I was a young boy. While it has obviously long been home to numerous Chinese restaurants, over the past couple decades a good number of eateries featuring other East Asian cuisines have opened there. Among those, there is none that I’ve eaten at more over the years than Penang, which specializes in Malaysian food and has outlets in several other East Coast cities in addition to Philly. 

It had been a while since my last visit, so I was excited when my mother suggested that we get together there for a recent Saturday lunch with my wife, sister and stepfather. 

Penang sits on a busy stretch of 10th Street that includes many restaurants, bakeries and barbecued meat shops that I frequented during my years of living in and working near Chinatown. 

Although it’s known as primarily a Malaysian restaurant, Penang’s menu also features items from other Southeast Asian cuisines. Unfortunately, they have moved to menus that need to be scanned on customers’ phones, so I wasn’t able to take my usual menu photos. But you can see it in its entirety here. 

When it comes to ordering at Penang, my family and I have several favorite dishes that we almost always get. One of those is the roti canai appetizer. In fact, we all love it so much that we requested four orders of it for the five of us. 

Roti is a delicious flat bread that has a bit of crispiness. It comes with a small bowl of chicken and potatoes in curry sauce for dipping. 

The other appetizer I always order at Penang is satay beef or chicken – the latter on this occasion. While the chicken skewers are fine on their own, what makes this dish special is the peanut flavored sauce that comes with it. I’ve had satay at a number of restaurants over the years, but no other place with which I’m familiar serves a peanut sauce that even comes close to the one at Penang. I like it so much that I always order an extra bowl of it, which I put on the noodle entree that I’ll get to momentarily. 

They don’t call me Captain Condiment for nothing. 

I’m no less a creature of habit when it comes to the main course I nearly always order when dining at Penang – nor is my mother. We both requested Mee Siam, a dish featuring seasoned rice noodles, shrimp, a hard-boiled egg, bell peppers, tofu and a lemon for squeezing. It all comes together beautifully, especially with the addition of the previously mentioned peanut sauce, which I mix in generously.

We also had a couple other noodle dishes on our table in addition to Mee Siam. 

My wife opted for an order of Singapore noodles, a dish featuring curried rice noodles that is common at Chinese restaurants – although it had a different look at Penang – while my sister ordered Thai basil noodles. It included wide rice noodles with shrimp, chicken, an assortment of vegetables and basil leaves. 

I had a taste of the latter and was mighty impressed. 

To add a little greenery to our order, my mother also requested stir-fried spinach with garlic, which was perfectly executed.

That was more than enough food for our group and we wound up taking much of the noodle dishes home for later enjoyment. It was a lovely lunch at an old stand-by that I was glad to revisit. 

As my wife and I walked south on 10th Street toward our car after leaving Penang, I couldn’t resist taking a photo of the window and various meats behind it at what was one of my favorite places from which to take out food during the eight years that I lived in Chinatown. The sight of all that barbecued duck, pork, chicken and quail brought back wonderful memories.

Back in September of last year I posted on my process for preparing a Sunday Gravy with beef short ribs and hot Italian sausage. It’s been a long-time plan of mine to make a gravy with just short ribs at some point, and I finally got around to doing that a couple weeks ago.

While I decided against devoting another stand-alone post to it, here are some photos I snapped.

I’ll return next week with a post about a popular cheesesteak and pizza shop in Northeast Philadelphia.