When in Malaysia…EAT NOODLES.

I’m one of those ignorant kids who grew up thinking there was only one kind of noodle. Or maybe two, the kind that you’d pop out of a Maggi pack. Or those Italian hoses of Bolognese coated with minced meat. That was it.

I’m also one of those kids who grew up never really embarking on any sort of quest for noodle enlightenment. They never excited me to begin with, so I was happy to let unexciting dormant noodle dogs lie. By this wise stage of my life, I knew there were other kinds, soba, buckwheat, rice, udon, whatever else, but noodle history isn’t a topic that would have prompted me to curl up on a sofa and spend the next few hours reading about it the way, for instance, stuffed parathas might.

If I were Kung Fu Panda, daddy would hang his goose neck in shame right about now.

Source: Kung Fu Panda Wiki

Flash forward to Chinatown in Kuala Lumpur where I found myself last week. Where I experienced a sort of noodle coming-of-age.

Chinatown's Wet Market in Kuala Lumpur

Standing at the tip of KL’s Chinatown is like facing a gigantic suction pump. You’re just edges away from the rim, one step forward and you’ll get whooshed in to this massive world of smells and sights and flavours, wanted and unwanted, all being flung in your face. And noodles. I’ve never seen so many noodles being chopped, dunked, twirled and slurped within a one mile radius of me. A little ignorant voice in me whispered: Golly. There are so many different types of noodles. And so many different ways of preparing the different types. And I don’t understand the names. Uh oh.

Maybe the thought of curling up on a sofa and doing some noodle research before stepping into this slurpy menagerie wouldn’t have been such a bad idea after all.

Or I could have just turned to the last section of my handy Lonely Planet Guide to Malaysia, the one that I obviously found on my flight home to Dubai, and quickly skimmed two of Robyn Eckhardt’s brilliantly simple paragraph on noodles in Malaysia. She describes the Chee Cheong Fun, a frivolous sounding noodle that I had glimpsed in KL’s Chinatown when I walked past stall owners slicing up translucent “steamed rice flour sheets into strips topped with meat gravy or chilli and black prawn sauces.”

On the right, the Chee Cheong Fun Stall that I passed up for Assam Laksa

But I had skipped them because Assam Laksa had been my noodle aim for the day. Robyn’s description of laksa from a particular stall (‘the end stall’) in Chinatown’s Madras lane had me fixed on ordering the dish, though I clumsily picked the wrong ‘end’ of the line of stalls and chose a laksa stand that wasn’t the one glorified in Robyn’s writings. Yet, those white rice noodles, concealed under a sweet, throat-warming, sardine and minty broth was quite an exact replica of the Laksa that Robyn had described.

Assam Laksa, Madras Lane in KL's Chinatown

Fat chunks of tinned sardine bobbed up at the top of the soup, garnished with mint and ominous Thai bird chilies. The heat of the laksa was a different, superficial kind—the kind that made my face erupt into a sweating, heaving volcano, the kind that coursed down my throat with a fiery urgency, barely extinguished by its complex constitution of sweet pineapple bits, onion, and fleshy tinned sardine chunks. But by the time the broth and its noodle flotsam had reached my belly, the fire was gone. This was not like Indian spice, not the sadistic kind that burns you in your chest, in your lower tummy, and in all other bad places that were never made to burn.

The laksa noodles were thick, gelatinous, most likely rice flour-based, and responded to my teeth with a far more substantial bite than the noodles in the Johor Laksa I sampled with Mark, the Simply Enak tour guide, in Petaling Jaya. I sadly don’t remember much of the Johor Laksa (sorry Mark. I suck.), but to be fair, (a) my stomach had been overextended during a food tour the night before, (b) Mark had just fed me a Malaysian breakfast at the local wet market, with my favorite black sesame buns included, and (c) I had a plate of sweet, fragrant Beef Rendang that was vying for my attention at the time the Johor Laksa made an appearance. My scant notes on the dish say: “broth made from fish, minty taste, kalamansi, onions, basil.” And Wikipedia declares that Johor Laksa replaces from the thick Laksa noodle with plain spaghetti noodles. So be it. Fishy, minty, lemony soup of spaghetti noodles.

Johor Laksa with Simply Enak food tours, Petaling Jaya, KL

Another noodle variant that I stuck my chopsticks into were the yellow Chinese mee noodles that appeared in my soup bowl at the Imbi market. In a market throbbing with steaming vats and big net noodle ladles and pimpled deep-fried shapes and a mountain of other foods that were screaming out exotically scary but exciting names, I ordered the…Chicken Sliced Noodle. Sometimes I make such walloping big mistakes that hitting my head with a rock-hard coconut feels inadequate, hence I lay it bare on this blog so you can all laugh and point fingers and fling subpar noodles at me. I may have been blind to the insipid name, but the soup more than made up for it, mocking me with a blandness that even the scallions and sambal couldn’t salvage. In a place where I should have scaled the peak of Malaysian culinary experimentation, I was instead hanging precariously from the threads of noodle mediocrity.

Chicken Sliced Noodle at the Imbi Market, or more commonly known as Pasar Baru Bukit Bintang, Kuala Lumpur

The Imbi market disappointment was a far cry from the Prawn Hokkien Mee I had shared with mom two nights before at Little Penang Kafé in the mall adjacent to the Petronas towers.  The massive bowl of Hokkien Mee showcased fat boiled egg halves, chicken strips, two juicy prawns and swamp cabbage (kankong) delicately floating over a spicy, deadly flavorful broth that’s the perfect mix of tastes to bring you back to earth after you’ve scaled the Petronas next door. The soup twirled its way around two kinds of noodles: yellow egg noodles as well as bee hoon, or rice vermicelli, that traced the broth with its skinny, silky fingers.

Prawn Hokkien Mee, Little Penang Kafé in Suria, KLCC

Noodles also made an appearance at the Nasi Kandar restaurants peppered all about the country. Nasi Kandars are flavourful imprints of South Indian, often Muslim, immigrants on the Malaysian culinary scene, and serve everything from tandoori chicken to thosai (aka dosa). In contrast to their Malay or Chinese counterparts, the Nasi Kandar noodle versions were usually left ‘unsouped’ and stir-fried as mee goreng, full of Indian-style curry powder, and reminiscent of the Maggi curry flavor that almost every Indian child, and every Indian adult who has remnants of an Indian child within him, loves irrationally. In fact, in many places, the restaurants use the Maggi mix right out of the pack.

Maggie Mee Goreng at the Gurney Tower, Penang

My plate of Maggi Goreng Ayam at Penang’s Gurney Tower was topped with chopped fried chicken, tender white chunks with the curried crispy skin left intact.  Even though I had initially scoffed at the thought of going to a restaurant to have them whip something out of a Maggi pack for me, you’d be surprised, the addition of crispy fried chicken and some restaurant wok grease really does amp up those noodles a notch higher than what you can slurp down at home. [Thanks for taking me here Pris!]

Another type of noodle that slid its way down during my dinner in Penang was the Kway Teow, flat rice noodles that are the protagonist of Penang’s famed Char Kway Teow. These noodles are usually throbbing with thick soy sauce and oodles of wok grease, topped with cockles, eggs, bean sprouts, shrimp and often pork, unless you go for the porkless version that I found at the nightly street food market on Penang’s Gurney Drive.

Char Kway Teow Stall in Gurney Drive, Penang

It was the same night that I had been running a fever, and teetered out of my hotel room in search of food. Either it was the fever that had numbed my taste buds, or the Char Kway Teow stall I picked wasn’t the life of Penang noodle action, but this much hyped and lauded dish didn’t really have me lasso-ing the stall owner with my last noodle for more. After five greasy spoonfuls, I put my plastic fork down in resignation.

Char Kway Teow at Gurney Drive, Penang

I think I had enough noodles on one trip to sling me all the way to China and back. And even then, I know I left the country not having noodled my way through so many other variants, be it the coconut-based Laksa Lemak, the Loh See Fun that Robyn Eckhardt unappetizingly describes as stubby ‘rat tail’ noodles, sticky Lor Mee (though I doubt I’d get a pork-free version), the Won Ton Mee dumpling and noodle combination, the potato gravied egg noodles of Mee Rebus, or the beef noodle shops I saw people flocking to on Chinatown’s Petaling Street. I was like that small little ringlet of a scallion lost in a sea of soupy noodles, surrounded by so many options that weren’t even really options because I hadn’t done my homework before the trip. Maybe curling up with a book on noodle history and culture before my next trip to the Far East won’t be such a bland idea after all.

Assam Laksa
Madras Lane Stalls
Chinatown, KL

Johor Laksa
With Simply Enak Food Tours
Santai Restaurant
10, Persiaran Zaaba, Taman Tun Dr. Ismail, KL10 Persiaran Zaaba, KL
Phone: (03) 7728-8173
Petaling Jaya

Chicken Sliced Noodle
Stall at Imbi Market (official name: Pasar Baru Bukit Bintang), KL

Prawn Hokkien Mee
Little Penang Kafé
Suria, KLCC
Phone: (03) 2163-0215

Maggi Mee Goreng
Kapitan’s Nasi Kandar
Gurney Tower, Penang
Phone: (04) 8182-811

Char Kway Teow
Night Market Stalls at Gurney Drive, Penang

Author: InaFryingPan

With a family legacy of ingenious cooks, a nutritionist and chef-extraordinaire mother, and a father who introduced me to steak and caviar when I could barely reach the table, I had no choice but to acquire a keen awareness of food during my childhood years in Dubai. But it was only after I found myself on a college campus in Philadelphia – far away from home, too cheap as a student to spend on anything other than pizza, and with dorm rooms that had little rat-holes of kitchens if they even had them at all – when I developed a heightened appreciation of food. An appreciation of food that I once ate every night at the dinner table in Dubai, but that was now an entire ocean away. I lusted for the culinary treasures that lay outside the stale walls of my college dining hall, hijacked friends’ kitchens to try my hand at something, anything , remotely edible, and greedily raided different websites in search of highly-rated restaurants. With my move to New York to work for a consulting firm that secretly harbored self-professed foodies, my appreciation transformed into a passion, an addicition. I felt like everyone around me in New York was talking about food: where to get the best cupcakes, pizza slices, banh mi, kati rolls, pho, fried chicken, and every other food item out there that is just a plain old dish in some part of the world, but that’s become hyped to unforeseen proportions in New York. What fuelled my addiction over time was travel to different cities, both for work and play, which gave me unfettered access to the culinary havens of not only New York, but also of DC, Virginia, Chicago, Houston, Vegas, Austin, Seattle and even a little city called Bentonville (Arkansas!). After 9 years away from home, I’ve finally taken the leap to come back to Dubai – with not just an awareness, but genuine appreciation and passionate addiction for what I’d taken for granted as a child. Mom, I’m back to reclaim my seat at your dinner table, and to rediscover this city with its ever-expanding menu of international flavors.

17 thoughts on “When in Malaysia…EAT NOODLES.

  1. Mark Ng says:

    It’s ok Arva, you have to come back so that I will explain things in more details and with printouts! :)

    Reply
  2. Platetrotter says:

    You have made me consider lunch an hour earlier :) Malaysia is a foodie paradise! I’m sure you were well in your element (despite the noodle ignorance early on) ;)

    Reply
  3. Francine Spiering says:

    damn now you’ve got me all drooling and longing for laksa. Aside from the glorious photographs and tantalising descriptions, your incredible sense of humor as always keeps me a captivated reader!

    Reply
  4. Didi says:

    Hahaha! Noodles to you is like bread to me here :) I think the noodle thing is really an Asian thing. In the Philippines, we also have a gazillion ways to prepare noodles and each is different…sooo different. Imma noodle lovah so me likey this post!

    If you were allowed to eat pork, I’m sure you would have eaten even MORE noodles in MY!

    Lemme wipe of the drool on my keyboards. You made me lotsa hungreh and miss one of the me most favorite places on earth!

    Reply
    1. InaFryingPan says:

      @Mark Ng – ahhh printouts would be fabulous! or even better, a second tummy so that I can fully appreciate everything I eat on tour ;)

      @Platetrotter – it is a foodie paradise indeed. And people like Robyn Eckhardt have revealed the ’choicest fruits’ to pluck in that paradise…thank God for smart food writers to show us the way ;)

      @Francine Spiering – thank you! And your article on Chiang Mai had pretty much the same effect on me…though in retrospect, I expressed it quite ineloquently (I know, that’s not a word, but it should be.) in my comment on your site.

      @Didi – It is an Asian thing, I think I would have similar noodle enlightenment were I to visit Singapore, China, Japan, Korea. And true that, pork sort of narrowed down my options, so maybe that was a blessing in disguise else I would have totally got lost in the noodle haystack ;)

  5. IshitaUnblogged says:

    Actually our recent trip to Singapore opened my eyes to Noodles – Before that I too was of the opinion that ’there was only one kind of noodle. Or maybe two, the kind that you’d pop out of a Maggi pack’!

    Laksa – I have been drooling over this. I’m totally besotted by it. Have been searching from one ethnic supermarket to other (from Satwa to Karama to even Deira) – I will be ever grateful if somebody can guide me to one which sells ’the’ noodles to make typical Laksa. While I loved the Curry Laksa I have to admit that I didn’t quite fancy the Assam Laksa… so now your meals are going to comprise of only noodles I suppose!

    Reply
  6. @LaMereCulinaire says:

    Such insightful brain filling information aabout noodles!

    I want to try more noodles now that i know a good amount of info about them!

    Reply
  7. saleem says:

    Well written article and would come in handy when I get a chance to visit Malaysia and try the some of the dishes you have mentioned – best will be you take me and tell me what best is to eat

    Reply
  8. Sally says:

    Who knew there was so much to noodles! It’s like the aroma is wafting off this account.

    Reply
    1. InaFryingPan says:

      @IshitaUnblogged – So I have been goggling to find you laksa noodles in Dubai, and of course, the Asian queen Scribblelicious has written about a version she found in Waitrose. Not quite the laksa noodle pack you’d hope, it’s one of those instant mixes, but she’s given it the seal of approval so I would definitely recommend checking it out! http://www.scribblelicious.com/?p=6595

      @LaMereCulinaire – And try you must! I hear noodle bowl in Satwa does deadly noodles, so maybe there’s an option to be tried closer to home…

      @abigail-mynappytales – …and somehow, after tasting your fabuloso ube cupcakes, I get the sense that your magical chef hands could whip up a wicked bowl of noodles for your boys too? ;) Share the recipe and make us all drool in misery!

      @saleem – of course dad, I would LOVE to take you and show you around, the best thing you could ask me to do ever :D

      @Sally – aw thank you! On a separate note, I do love your comments. Someone could wipe your name off of the comment and I would know the sweet, thoughtful response would always be yours.

  9. Tasmeea says:

    I grew up in Malaysia so this post was a very nice nostalgic read for me. Thank you! It really is the best place for a little foodie exploration.

    Reply
  10. nadia says:

    I read this post yesterday and have been pestering the husband to take me to Malaysia to (hopefully) attain the same noodle enlightenment as you. Just had dinner but your narration and pictures are making me hungry all over again! I hope there are more Malaysian food adventure posts coming up soon :)

    Reply
    1. InaFryingPan says:

      @Tasmeea – Hooray for childhood memories! I take it you’re a noodle guru then… :)

      @nadia – Uh oh. The Husband probably hates me now. And yep, he better brace himself, more food adventure posts in the land of noodles and shrimp paste to come soon!

  11. Chef and Steward says:

    Sharing this with the chef. He lived in Malaysia for some time and really has a special place in his heart for the place! BTW Notice that our details are no longer stored for comments so we have to type in each time. Pls have a look into.

    Reply
    1. inafryingpan says:

      Hope this brought back memories for the chef :) And I have tried switching my comments platform, hope this works now!

  12. Ralph Busselot says:

    for your info, Noodle Bowl on al Diyafah street is without doubt the best place tohave MY Laksa in Dubai. it’s a must try!!

    Reply

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