The new Malaysian restaurant Penang may be the last wave, for now, in the current Malaysian food explosion around Spring Mountain Road. It's the third, and most consistent, restaurant serving this cuisine to open here in the past two years.
The name derives from a Chinese-speaking island in Malaysia. It's on the mezzanine level in a new mini-mall already home to Champion Gourmet, an exotic Taiwanese food store that specializes in items like duck tongue and spicy pig's ear, and Hang's, a tea and herb shop my Chinese friends swear is a place to cure anything from warts to a bad flu.
I've been coming to this mall, called Pacific Asian Plaza, regularly for the past year or so, mainly for banh mi, Vietnamese-style submarine sandwiches. They sell for $2.49 at Hue Thai's, a few doors down; now that this place is here, I fear I'll never be able to stay away.
Perhaps Penang should take down that grand-opening sign—it's already been two months. But the sign that tells us they are now open until 3 a.m. is good news. After an evening of Vegas-style excess, I can't think of anything I'd like to dig into more than a platter of this kitchen's Penang satay, skewered chicken or beef served with onions, cucumbers and gooey, sweet peanut sauce.
The design here is, shall we say, eccentric. It's essentially a huge, mustard-yellow box, yellow walls, Cape Cod-style captain's chairs, lacquered tables polished to a bright sheen and a trompe l'oeil shack door leading to the restrooms, "Nature Calls" painted over it. Service waxes and wanes the way it does in many low-rent Asian restaurants, a dance between obsequious platitudes and annoying indifference.
The menu has 155 entries, at least 100 of which are probably unfamiliar to anyone who has never been to Malaysia. The cuisine in that country is a mixture of influences, notably Chinese, Indian and Indonesian. That means a lot of the food is spicy, if not outright blistering hot. Happily for us, the hot dishes can be ordered mild or medium, upon request.
Five meaty, charbroiled sticks comprise the satay, with burnt-sugar crusts on the edges concealing tender beef or chicken. Roti canai is a crisp, Indian-style bread, alongside a bowl of rich chicken curry to dip it in, a bargain at only $3.25. Roti telur means that the bread is stuffed with egg, onion and green chilies, like a crepe might be. Both are great.
But those three items only scratch the surface of the appetizers, which can make a more satisfying meal here than entrées. Baby oyster omelet should be eaten with an order of the Ipoh bean sprouts (named after a Malaysian city), the vegetables steamed in a light chili sauce. Shrimp puffs are balls of deep-fried, minced shrimp wrapped in bacon. They remind me of '60s Polynesian cuisine we ate wearing party hats, in places with names like Don the Beachcomber.
Fried noodles are a raison d'etre at Penang, since Malaysians eat them obsessively. I like Penang's char kway teow, stir-fried rice noodles blackened in a metal pan with shrimp, squid, bean sprouts, eggs, sweet soy sauce and a touch of chili paste. Use noodles made from wheat and eggs, and the dish morphs into mee goreng, or "fried noodles." It's spicier than the kway teow, and the noodles taste faintly of coriander and turmeric.
Noodle soups are a must. Asam laksa could be the most exotic among them, a spicy and sour broth flavored with lemon grass and shaved fish flakes, but chicken feet lo mee, and bak kut teh, an herbal pork-rib soup, give the laksa a run for its money.
At lunch, I favor nasi lemak, a mound of coconut-flavored rice flanked by a rich, spicy chicken stew, hard-boiled eggs, sliced cucumbers and curried anchovy paste. Another good choice is Hainanese chicken, hacked, steamed and served with oily rice and a garlic sauce heady enough to stop traffic. Don't eat this one before a business meeting.
During the evening, Chinese and Malaysian families come here for more substantial fare. Just a few of the more popular dishes are kang kung belacan, sautéed water spinach with a spicy Malaysian fermented shrimp paste; curry fish head, served minus the head (the management says Americans can't handle the fish head); and ginger scallion crab, more Chinese than Malay, but wonderful finger food.
Don't miss the otherworldly desserts, the least forbidding of which is peanut pancake, a crepe stuffed with a filling that tastes like Jif. If you're really in an Indiana Jones mode, though, ice kacang is the ticket. With shaved ice, red beans, corn, palm seed, grass jelly, crushed peanut, red rose syrup and a float of evaporated milk, its taste range—salty, sweet and creamy—was invented for a hot Vegas summer day.