This was originally submitted as an entry to the 2017 World Nomads Travel Writing Scholarship. The original submission can be found here. 

THE BEST COFFEE POWDER SOLD HERE IN RETAIL

So reads the sign on the wall behind the counter at Toon Leong in English and Mandarin. It’s not hyperbole. On all 5 days I spend in Penang I have visited this family-run kopitiam for my daily iced coffee, which is unrivalled by any other corner coffeeshop. They roast and grind their own beans with butter and sugar. Mixed with condensed milk, their kopi peng is a beguilingly smooth, chocolatey brew that promises joy and diabetes in equal measure.

Less sweet, I always say. Make it strong.

On my final morning here, I wake up for an early breakfast at Toon Leong. It hosts Deen’s nasi kandar stall, where one can feast on rice and various side dishes, such as catfish curry, and stewed aubergine so tender it swoons on your fork. I linger over my rice and coffee, watching people come and go.

It’s busy this morning. A middle-aged man sits down opposite me with his plate of rice. He is obviously local, and we soon fall to conversation.

“Uncle, where you like to eat?” I ask. Penang’s hawker food is superb, and I plan on a return trip. In my haste to jot down his suggestions, I spill my coffee. He waves the owner over and buys me another, refusing to let me pay.

According to him, it’s tourists from the capital who are making street food prices go up.

“We call them those bastard hungry ghosts from KL. They come and they give the fler money and say, nah, you just put more liao. More stuff. Then they simply whack la. Then price go up.” He snorts. Street food operators in Penang know how much they’re worth.

I grin and tell him I’m from Kuala Lumpur, and he looks a little abashed.

“Oh.”

As we talk I am struck by how all the residents I’ve spoken to are quick to highlight the disappearing faces of Penang. On Georgetown: “All old people only. Half-dead.” This cendol seller: “He close down last year. Too old already.” That congee stall: “The owner run away. Loan sharks got him.” A fish curry guy: “No more. He died. Accident.”

Just before I leave to catch my plane, I take a photo of the sign behind the counter.

“80 years.” One of the elderly uncles seated nearby suddenly announces, looking directly at me.

“Hm?”

“80 years. This kopitiam. 3 generations. This is the last one. Nobody left to take over.” The other patrons are looking at me now.

I wave to the owner, who suddenly looks frailer, more brittle somehow. He smiles at me and nods. He says, “see you tomorrow.”

Next time, I’ll ask him how they roast their coffee.

Proof that you can buy happiness for 30THB – or at least, a certain ecstatic bliss lasting approximately 6 minutes.

The lady with the cowboy hat at the North Gate market (what a mouthful of a title) braises vats of pork knuckle into submission. Each plate of rice is bathed in that soy braising liquid, topped with tender, cleaver-shredded strips of meat interspersed with melting fat.

The egg is good but not necessary. The chili sauce, however, is. It’s mild and tangy, all lime juice, garlic, vinegar and chili, similar to one you’d serve with chicken rice in Malaysia. A small plate is just enough, allowing you to continue stall-hopping through the market.

My favorite version was at the same stall serving mushroom soup at the Sunday walking market. Light, fresh, and juicy, unstinting on the lime juice. I wish I could articulate exactly why their som tam was so much better than all the other versions we had, though I think the papaya may have been cooler, temperature-wise, and consequently more refreshing.

At the night market outside Ton Lam Yai, there’s just one som tam stall, and she’s shredding green papaya non-stop all night. The salad is pretty good – a definite dried shrimp presence here – but fiery. Each order is mixed and pounded in the same mortar, so even without chillies, the salad still burned our tongues off. The lingering capsaicin from other orders is enough to light up the dressing.

Also read: this delightfully geeky blog post on som tam 

Kang hed is unapologetically not photogenic. It is an unprepossessing gray-brown, and you’re sitting on stools slurping this soup. But it is absolutely incredible, which is perhaps what has prevented it from being Instagrammed to death.

Take a pork bone broth and spike it with lemongrass and enough minced ginger and garlic to burn your oesophagus. Add mushrooms of choice, triangles of pumpkin and gourd, more unidentifiable green leaves. (There’s so much I don’t know!) Tamarind ties it all together, infusing the soup with this bewitching tanginess. Herbaceous, deeply earthy, warming. Exactly what our stomachs needed that evening.

One of my absolute favourite dishes eaten in Chiang Mai wasn’t even Thai. It turned out to be a Shan noodle dish called khaut sew, which we found out after some help from Google Translate from a vendor at a night market. L and I had walked up and down the narrow strip of road between the stalls several times, sussing out all the food and zeroing in on the stalls that looked most worth eating. (It pays to take your time before deciding what to spend your limited stomach space on.) We kept looping back to a vendor towards the less-crowded side of the market, near the entrance of Ton Lam Yai market and next to the som tam stall. Look for a youngish lady with carefully made-up red lips and immaculate hair.

To begin, a generous handful of shredded cabbage. You can choose your noodles, and we went for the thin white ones – the lightly-fermented rice noodles so common to this region. Stop her from adding too many noodles; you want to save space for the rest of the market. A ladle of mysterious sauce from a bucket underneath her table, which turned out to be a dark tomato and minced chicken sauce, spiked with fermented bean paste. Then the seasonings – a shake of this, a pinch of that. Crushed peanuts, a heckton of deep-fried garlic, sugar, some dark chilli flakes, salt, premium soy sauce, a little MSG (deal with it yo), coriander leaves. The key to the magic: mixing all of this by hand, almost massaging the noodles so the sauce and seasonings evenly coat each strand.

Khaut sew hits all my favorite flavor profiles in a single noodle bowl — salty and spicy, a little funky from the fermented bean paste. Completely blows soba and udon out of the noodle water.

On this sultry Monday evening in July, we have teetered down a most precarious spiral staircase into a basement izakaya for an early dinner. It’s 6pm at the beginning of the workweek and we are the first people to have trickled in. They serve island food – Hachijo Island, to be exact – but it’s hard to shake off the knowledge that one is in the heart of a concrete jungle. It might be the underground heat enveloping us from the feet up, the noticeable lack of air-conditioning when we first arrive, the fact that the owners are just as languid in in the way they shuffle to and fro from our table, drifting away mid-order to answer the phone. 

We order from a handwritten menu: ashitaba tempura, agedashi tofu, the chef’s salad, Hachijo Island sushi. All of it is pretty good, though I keep thinking this would taste better under the stars by the sea, with the wind in our hair. Wishful thinking.

The true star of the night is a deceptively simple-sounding kaki bataa – buttered oysters – pan-fried oysters drenched in a sauce of oyster juices, shoyu, sake and a fuckton of butter. It is as it sounds and so much more. Unlike most Japanese sauces of this ilk, it is not sweet with mirin or sugar. ‘Sultry’ applies to more than just heat; the nutty overtones of this buttery sauce are utterly seductive. If oyster caramels existed this is what they’d taste like, the oysters having released their juices into the sauce and soaking it right back up with butter and salt.

Once we’re finished with the oysters I call for a bowl of steaming white rice, and mix this in with the remaining sauce: why waste? It’s buttered rice but with an ocean punch that’s a million times more delicious. For a moment, I can believe I’m by the sea, under the stars.

Obviously, these aren’t really called ‘heart attack gyoza’ but they may as well be. You have a filling of garlicky minced chicken, chicken fat and negi – so far, so good. However, these are wrapped not in floury wheat squares but chicken skin. Blistered by the heat of bubbling oil, salted and then dragged through a puddle of zingy, citrusy dipping sauce. These little artery bombs sits on a little bed of finely-shredded cabbage, a hint of lip service to health. But we all know these are a Southerner’s dream. This is a vascular nightmare in a mouthful and by God is it glorious.

Suiba Rokkaku Tominokoji Branch
77, Rokkaku-dori
Daikokucho, Nakagyo Ward
Kyoto

I love haori, which are loose, hip-length jackets with billowing kimono-like sleeves, and wear them almost always when I leave the house. This is true even outside of Japan as long as the weather permits. Virtually no one under the age of 60 actually wears haori, so old Japanese ladies tend to stop me on the street and comment on my outfit. One lady has actually walked around me and fingered the sleeves of my jacket – ooh, it’s a nice material. It makes for some interesting encounters.

When I get on the MUNI one day it’s the same story: these three Japanese ladies seated together notice my jacket and say it looks nice. We exchange small talk in a mix of Japanese and English, and I end up sitting next to one of them. There’s yet another old lady seated in front of me, who turns around to see what’s up. She says hello and sets off another round of small talk. I can almost cycle through this in my sleep. She’s a slight, moderately wrinkled lady with permed grey hair and tinted glasses, with a heavy Cantonese accent Americans like to call ‘fobby.’ Her husband was born in Sabah, she’s from Hong Kong, they moved here some decades ago, etc.

Then she says to me, ah, you don’t speak Mandarin, do you.

It must be some kind of combative streak in me, some misplaced postcolonial banana defensiveness that always, always prompts me to contradict a statement like that. My spoken Mandarin is frankly quite awful. For someone who spent so long in a Chinese-medium school – 6 years, and another few years of classes – I bumble through most conversations with the grace of a beached jellyfish. But I rise to the occasion of a seeming accusation and there is no turning back: the moment I respond in Mandarin her face lights up and she launches into full-blown Chinese aunty mode.

Are you a student?

Praise the Lord, I still look young enough to pass. No, I tell her. I live in Japan. I like it there. I’m just visiting.

Do you go to church? No? You can listen to Christian radio in Cantonese, you know. And also Chinese.

She hands me a flyer.

Oh really, I say. Japan has a way of honing your ability to feign interest in conversation. I mean, I am interested – just not in the way she thinks.

You know, if you’re free you should come to church. Just come. You know, there are many nice boys here. Nice boys who can speak both English and Chinese. (Oh really.) Very nice boys. You should come to church and meet them. Are you married? (No.) You’re not married yet? You’re so pretty! All the boys will be chasing after you! You’re a student? (I’m working already. But in Japan.) How long are you here for? You should stay in America, find a job here, meet a nice boy. Get married and bring your family over. You know? I think it’s very good.

Throughout her entire spiel I keep my eyes wide and murmur noises of assent. Internally, the thought of meeting a nice boy at church is setting my liver on fire. While she’s monologuing I recall the first time I stepped into a mosque, which ironically was in Hong Kong despite having lived in Malaysia for the first 18 years of my life. It was a beautiful prayer hall, almost glowing in the evening dark with its walls of turquoise and ruby-magenta prayer mats. One of the men there waylaid Z and I, proceeding to tell us in no uncertain terms that as non-believers we would burn in hell. At least Canto-Church Lady’s concerns are more, well, well-meaning.

As the MUNI clanks its way downtown I politely extricate myself from her attempts at finding me a boyfriend. She takes the flyer back from me. The Japanese lady next to me begins telling me about whirlpools in Tokushima and how it’s better to rent a car there, and this is the rest of my journey to Van Ness. Just before I alight, Canto-Church Lady hands the flyer back to me and there is a wall of text on the back now. This entire time she’s been industriously scribbling detailed directions to her church, even including times for worship in various languages. I feel a little bad because I’m never going to turn up, but her flyer is a rather priceless souvenir from these travels.

Just come when you’re free, she says, as I exit the train. Tomorrow is Sunday.

Nudge-nudge, wink-wink, yes I love a bad pun now let’s get on with it. Years of reading food blogs and media taught me that figs are glorious in season and that they go great with ricotta. But I can count the number of times I have had figs on my fingers (in all senses of that phrase – there must be a word for this kind of double meaning) and not particularly memorable ones at that.

I didn’t know how to choose figs either. The one time I made fig, ham and pine nut pasta – which sounds like it would be great, right – the figs were half-heartedly sweet, as though they’d spent a little too long inside a truck instead of the sun. It was one of those lunches that tasted like it was trapped at a crossroads of lost potential.

I don’t think I really understood a fig before Saturday.

These are black Mission figs, which I ate at Zuni Café. These dark violet-bruise Pac Man figs were split and smeared with ricotta, fine-wi ne balsamic and olive oil drizzled over. Toasted pine nuts, torn mint and Italian parsley scattered over. And that hint of salt on the creamy cheese and juicy fruit drove my tongue wiiiiild. Salt makes everything ten thousand times more seductive; my whole life feels like a search for salinity in strange places. Thinking about the figs reminded me of sweat I licked off someone’s collarbone after a hot day in the sun, that intense hit of salt and pleasure.

Sometimes you have to eat an excellent version of something before you understand what the whole point of it is. Then you can spend the rest of your life chasing the ghost of of that taste.