TacoCat’s Travels #206 (Penang): Discovering Food Delights at Wonde...

Hey Hive!

If you missed the last few posts, I started sharing about our short getaway to Penang Island, Malaysia, back in July 2022! It was our first trip post-covid and we decided to go on a short 3 day getaway there! It had been at least a decade since either of us have visited Penang so this was a semi-new experience for both of us.

Last week, we had a nice relaxing brunch at this place called Le Cafe, which specialises in sandwiches! We're not really sandwich people but they did have some unique flavours and it was pretty delicious!

We didn't really have a plan for our last day in Penang, but since Georgetown also has a bunch of different touristy museums, we figured we'd go check out the one about food since we're foodies!

Called the Wonderfood Museum, it is supposedly known for their giant displays of Malaysia's favorite traditional delicacies! They've also won Top Museum many for many years.

Last time, we barely arrived at the museum so it's time to take a walk through and see what it has to offer!

26 July 2022. Tuesday.

At the entrance there was also a little display of hawkers doing food acrobatics, which I guess is fairly accurate. If you've ever seen teh tarik ("pulled" milk tea) being prepared in Malaysia before you'd see it is an art.

And it's not just teh tarik, of course. There are other dishes as well that use food acrobatics and you can find them at most hawker centers in Penang.

The first thing we see past the entrance is a whole array of Malaysia's street food on display.

Of course we recognise most of them since we have many of these dishes in Singapore too, although there are some differences here and there.

Although, one curious dish that is remarkably different is Hokkien Mee. In Singapore, Hokkien Mee is light coloured and uses a few different types of noodles and has a savoury, seafood taste:

Source: misstamchiak

But in Malaysia, Hokkien Mee is kind of the total opposite since it is stir fried in black sauce and is more sweet and salty:

Source: Christie at home

The good thing is they're both delicious, and I do enjoy both dishes a lot. But it's always confusing when I go to Malaysia and am craving Hokkien Mee only to remember this quirky piece of trivia after I get a different dish.

Anyway, back to the museum, there is also a display of Penang's famous delicacies and of course #1 is the famous Char Kway Teow which Penang is known for.

The replicas of the dishes look very accurate to the real thing for sure. Other than maybe the glossiness of it I would think it was real.

After that were displays of information about the different cultural festivals in Malaysia and little figures to demonstrate how its celebrated, mostly involving food of course.

These vertical displays of the replicas made it look like they were anti-gravity too.

There was also a gallery of Malaysian's Daily Eating Pattern which I wasn't sure if it was super accurate but I guess that's the general consensus.

This board says that the average Malaysian can eat up to 6 meals a day! I guess it depends on what is defined as a meal, but I don't doubt this fact.

They even list the time that is common for said meal and what is most commonly eaten for that meal, along with a little figure display of how it was eaten back in the day.

I thought the little figurines were actually really well done and accurate! While I was not around during this time I have read stories about the days before hawker centers and it was just like this; selling food on the roadside.

I have to commend the artists who worked on these figures; they even got the brand of margarine right - Planta! It really is impressive how detailed they were given how small the figures are.

There was also an impressive display of Peranakan food since there is some significant Peranakan history in Southeast Asia when the South China settlers moved here between the 14th and 17th centuries.

Next was some common Malay food eaten during festive occasions!

While I am familiar with most of these I did learn some new things like Lemang, which is a traditional food made of glutinous rice, coconut milka dn salt cooked in a hollowed bamboo stick. I don't think I've ever seen Lemang before but it does sound like ketupat but in a bamboo stick.

Along the way in the museum each room has a little photo spot with props like this one:

Last but not least was the Chinese display of food!The one we're most familiar with of course and they had all our favourites!

For Chinese festival food they of course chose Yu Sheng, which is eaten during Chinese New Year and is definitely the most communal since it involves a group of people tossing the ingredients in the air while yelling various auspicious wishes as a symbol of bringing in good fortune.

Since Malaysia has these 3 main races that was it for this room of cultural food! I do like that they included Peranakan food as well since it's a blend of the different communities.

Next was a huge display of Nasi Kandar; which is an Indian Muslim dish from Penang referring to rice and assortment of Indian curries and side dishes. In the olden days of pre-independence Malaysia, a man would lug heavy baskets hawking his home-cooked dishes and rice hanging from a yoke across his shoulder and I guess that's how Nasi Kandar came to be.

I knew of nasi kandar and while I don't eat it often I never knew it originated from Penang specifically!

There was even a top 10 list of Nasi Kandar restaurants in the museum! I'm not sure how updated they keep this list but since Penang is not really that big I guess it must not be that difficult. Most of these kind of restaurants to last a long time and have established histories.

The next room was the exhibition room where you could take pictures in a bunch of different displays of food in various states! Like this was the mouldy food display with a plaque that read "Imagine if food could go bad we can accept that nothing is eternal, so let's live in the present".

This was food in different colours, "Imagine if food can change colour we can change the way we look at life".

Some anti-gravity food? The plaque says "Imagine if food is weightless we can live without any pressure to conform".

The museum staff offered to help us take some photos too!

This one was a black-and-white display where the food kinda looked as bad as the mouldy one tbh. The plaque says "Imagine is food is colour blind we can live without discrimination".

The plaques felt like they were some cheesy lines you'd see on instagram but the displays were pretty cool looking! After that we came to the room with the larger-than-life displays that we were looking for!

Unfortunately some of them were covered up in these plastic barriers perhaps because of covid so there weren't many we could take a nice photo with.

But they did have all the common Malaysian street food and the descriptions of them. First of all was Nasi Lemak of course, the national dish of Malaysia:

We each chose our favourite dishes to take a picture with and I chose Char Kway Teow:

The biggest display was this whole cendol sculpture!

But this gigantic bowl of Penang Asam Laksa was quite impressive too.

There was another kind of laksa as well, called Curry Laksa which uses different ingredients and base compared to Asam Laksa which is more sour tasting since it has a tamarind base.

There were also some dishes we weren't that familiar with like Char Koay Kak which is fried rice cake with pickled radish.

Along the walls of this room were some extra displays like this Vegeland with broccoli, cauliflower and mushrooms with tiny people that looked pretty cool.

There was also a Sweetland with ice cream and desserts!

Along the walls were some extra information for the dishes like the ingredients, history and how to prepare them

There was also a display of Lok lok which are skewers of bite-size food like seafood, meat or vegetables which you would dip into a hot pot of boiling stock.