Penang

An island-themed Chinatown spot offering the polyethnic cuisine of Malaysia

by Robert Nadeau

685-691 Washington Street (Chinatown), Boston; 451-6372, 6373
Open Sun - Thurs, 11:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m.
Fri and Sat, 11:30 a.m. to midnight.
MC, Visa
Beer and wine
Sidewalk-level access

Penang is the second Malaysian restaurant to have opened in Chinatown, and it's an enormous hit, with lines out the door. It was so popular so early that your Phoenix reviewers (who don't like to stand in line) missed the opening rounds. The current menu has been toned down from the original version, and the flavors aren't quite as sharp as those at the first Malaysian restaurant, the lamented Banana Leaf. But service has apparently improved, and Penang is still full of surprises, exotic spice, and delicious dishes.

The restaurant is a big room that opens at street level, rising inside on several levels with wooden tables, jungle-hut pine, high-tech tin ductwork, and rope-wound posts -- suggesting the coast of Southeast Asia with a nostalgic hint of Trader Vic's. The loud open kitchen reminds us that this a branch of a New York restaurant.

Penang the place is a coastal island with a heritage similar to that of Singapore, mixing Malay and Siamese food influences with historic communities of semi-assimilated Chinese and Indian Muslims. Unlike most melting pots, this one actually generated exciting hybrid foods -- dishes with local spices, Chinese finesse, Indian breads, and brilliant use of hot chili peppers.

The don't-miss appetizer at Penang is roti canai ($2.50) a chewy, thin flatbread you can dip in a hot yellow curry with chicken and potatoes. The curry tastes Thai, and the bread has a South Indian name, but the effect is unique and delightful. "Penang delicacies" ($6.95) is a kind of mixed antipasto served in soup (!) -- either a clear broth, which makes it easier to fish out the delicacies, or a curry, which contributes a lot of flavor. Among the cuter delicacies are a stuffed mild anaheim chili, a couple of stuffed slices of Chinese bitter melon, a sheet of gluten and wads of fried tofu (both admirably flavored by the curry soup), fish balls, and slices of slender Asian eggplant.

In a more familiar mode, Penang satay ($5.95) is the Malay classic we know from its adopted form in Thai, Vietnamese, and Indonesian restaurants. The version at Penang is terrific: five spears of chicken or beef in a mustardy marinade (likely flavored with galangal), with a complex peanut sauce, and a version of the syrupy chili-pepper sauce the Thai call "squid sauce." The Penang popia ($6.95) is a quartet of unfried spring rolls filled with vegetables, and brilliantly painted with stripes of chili paste and sweet-bean paste.

Authentic but perhaps Americanized was the ayam pandan ($5.95), a platter of pleasantly fried cubes of chicken meat, each tied with a pandanus leaf. These ought to have been more aromatic than they were. Similarly, achat ($3.50) ought to have been a much spicier salad/pickle than these tingly shreds of cabbage, carrot, and zucchini. (This was a dish that really zinged at Banana Leaf.)

Indian rojak ($6.95) also probably lacked spice. What we had was a rather bland salad of shredded vegetables, slices of hard-boiled egg, and -- safe in all but name -- shredded dried jellyfish. It all came in a spicy brown sauce, covered with fried shrimp chips. Since Bostonians have been eating red-hot Thai salads for several years, I see no reason for the restraint here.

Our most exciting main dishes were Penang House Special Squids ($8.95) and House Special Lobster (market price, recently $14.95). Both were made with an exciting black sauce full of lemongrass and garlic, a decent dose of pepper, and who knows what else. Our lobster was hacked into pieces in the shell, as it would be in a Chinese restaurant, so there was a good choice of easy-to-get meaty pieces, as well as pieces that had to be chewed -- the better to enjoy the sauce.

A dish people keep coming back for is the "yam pot," actually a ring of fried mashed taro root offered with several toppings. We had the "Buddhist yam pot" ($8.95), with Asian and American vegetables in a garlicky soy-based sauce. The fun of the dish is the taro, a root with a naturally sweet, nutty flavor, and a surprising purple color when cooked.

I also recommend the rendang ($8.95), a kind of dry curry most typically applied to beef. Long, slow cooking tenderizes the chunks of meat, which absorb all the sauce. The flavor has some beefy sweetness, contrasted with the dry, astringent flavor of ginger. Coconut shrimp ($16.95) is based on some of the biggest prawns I've ever seen, deep-fried with or without shells per your order. There's no particular coconut flavor, so I suspect that, like the "oatmeal shrimp" at Banana Leaf, what we have is a name based on an ingredient used in the copious, crunchy batter. Penang seafood rice noodle ($6.95) is made with fine soft rice vermicelli and bits of squid, shrimp, corn, and bay scallops, topped with a nicely exotic sauce featuring the citronella aroma of lemongrass.

Three entrees I don't particularly recommend are the string beans with shrimp ($7.95), which come with a sauce I would describe as cheesy, although the effect probably derives from anchovy paste (it may ring a nostalgic bell for Southeast Asians); Singapore rice noodle ($5.75), which was hotter and livelier than the versions of this curried dish served in Cantonese restaurants, but had a burnt-wok flavor; and a dish of fried squid with red and green bell peppers ($7.95) that was just bland.

Penang originally offered desserts made of various beans in glasses of syrup and jello, but it seems to have stopped serving them to non-Asian customers. Our choices on two visits were bowls of warm, sweet soup. Bubur cha cha ($2) is a rich and filling coconut soup with cubes of yam and taro; pilut hitan ($2), also very typical of Penang cuisine, looks like black-bean soup, but is actually made from a black-husked sweet rice. Hot dessert soup seems odd for a tropical country like Malaysia, but if you deduct the soupy part, it's not so different from the hot bread pudding or fried pie they like in the American South.

Tables of six or more can be reserved at Penang, but most customers just show up early or late, or expect to wait in line. Once we were sitting down, we found the service excellent. The open kitchen makes things loud, but it's worth it for the sight of cooks twirling roti breads like pizza above their heads.