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Penang Private Tour and Culinary Tour
My family runs a private culinary tour where we take you to sample the best of Penang food plus local culture: hawker food/street food, local wet markets, fruit orchards and spice plantations, belacan (prawn paste) and soy sauce manufacturing plants, Nyonya food, home-stay meals, and more! Click here to learn more or contact me to inquire further.
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Penang hawker food—also known as street food—is world famous and legendary one has to try it out to justify it. In my honest opinion, Penang offers the best street food, thanks to its people and state authorities who fiercely embrace, cultivate, and take great pride in Penang’s unique street food culture and living traditions.
Born and raised in Penang, I might be bias, but great press such as Time Asia’s Best of Asia for “Best Street Food,” The New York Times’s “44 Places to Go in 2009,” plus throngs of tourists and foodies alike who come to Penang in search of great street food don’t lie. The recent UNESCO world heritage listing is just an icing on the cake for Penang tourism…
Excerpts from Time Asia:
Imagine a free-ranging buffet, several hundred square kilometers in area, through which to graze at will. This limitless cornucopia brings together some of the liveliest culinary traditions of Asia, and participation costs only a few dollars. That’s the Malaysian state of Penang. Mere mention of its name will set mouths watering—not only among Malaysians, but anyone lucky enough to have encountered its exceptional street food.
Got a thing for blistering sambals and sizzling noodles? Then make yourself at home. Generations of Chinese and Indian migrants certainly have—and it’s their cuisines, when added to the indigenous style (which itself incorporates elements of Malay and Thai), that have helped make Penang the food-hawker capital of Asia. Try Gurney Drive for char kway teow (stir-fried rice noodles), Balik Pulau for “Penang-style” laksa (more sour than the norm), and King Street for roti panggang—flat bread with coconut jam, toasted on a charcoal grill. Only in Penang could food this good be this cheap.
With this post and my Penang hawker food photo gallery (which do no justice to what Penang has to offer), I urge you to pay a visit to Penang if you can. With our very own low-cost carrier Air Asia flying to Malaysia and Penang from Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, United Kingdom, China (including Hong Kong and Macau), Taiwan, etc., you can get to Penang a lot easier than you say “Assam Laksa.”
For me, my dream is to take Anthony Bourdain, the “No Reservations” crew, my friends at Saveur to Penang one day. I wish to give them an insider’s guide to savoring the best of Penang hawker food.
To read more about Penang street food, please check out my good friend Eating Asia’s Penang chronicles here, here, here, here, and here.
If you’ve been to Penang, leave me a comment and let me know if Penang hawker food reigns supreme?
We are S’poreans and love the unique cuisines from both sides of the straits. We are constantly on the lookout for ‘best of’ recommendations from friends and family and now, from your website. Penang is unfortunately a little distant from my home town so it does not get visited as often as the other states. Yes, nowadays with modern highways and budget airlines providing quick direct connections theres no excuse to not venture further.
Your wonderfully presented recipes allow us, when the desire and cravings for comfort foods from the ‘old country’ making us homesick, to reminisce in the good old days. We’ve been living away from home for a number of decades in Canada and do make the occasional long flights home. On three of those trips we did visit Penang, sadly, far too briefly.
So, which are our most memorable food experiences from our short visits to Penang? Pisang Rajah Goreng Pisang, Char Kueh Teow, Penang style Laksa and Chendol……..and, of course the Durians
Thanks and Regards from
Philip and Joyce
Vancouver, Canada
That’s great that you visited Penang.
Hi! Bee,
I’ve been to Malaysia many times, and spent 2.5 years in S,pore.
I love Street food, and I certainly love mee goreng!!
Would you have a ‘street recipe’ for this delicious dish, per chance??
Thanks in hope.
Hi Rayland: https://rasamalaysia.com/recipe-indian-mee-goreng-indian-fried/. You can search all recipes using the BROWSE RECIPES on top of my page or the Search functions. All my Malaysian recipes here: https://rasamalaysia.com/recipes/malaysian-recipes/
iam interested in going to penang next year will be their for 2days can you recommend a tour package for me we are 2 pax and how much will it cost