Where to find amazing street food in Penang. (Short answer: everywhere.)
Lucky Peach
You can also say jalan jalan, which is a verb, meaning "to stroll" or "to hang out and have a nice time," and is what my mom says to my dad when she takes his arm and wants to amble around on a nice, clear night.
In Penang, Malaysia, the jalans seem to be paved with food. This both makes sense and doesn't: The temperature hovers at a haunting 80-plus degrees year round, meaning it's too hot to eat inside though it is also, actually, too hot to eat outside. There are cooks everywhere, standing over hot woks and huge broth pots, barking an unfamiliar Chinese dialect (it's Hokkien) while dispatching plate after same-looking plate as though they've been doing it forever—and many of them have.
All food is fast food in Penang: If you're ordering to go, drinks come in plastic bags outfitted with a piece of raffia to hang from the handlebars of your scooter; rice comes in banana leaves or newspaper packets. Noodles are bagged and soups are too. If you're eating "in," you're still eating outside or half outside, and you're expected to eat fast, then go on to eat the next thing — fast. Colorful melamine plates and bowls and chopsticks get washed in huge buckets, and dirty dishwater spills into the streets.
Rachel Khong / Lucky Peach
Street food in Malaysia — and especially in Penang — can be overwhelming: the abundance, the no-nonsense-ness, the speed. There are hawker stalls on small streets, on big streets, hawker centers outside and inside of coffee shops. One comforting fact: the same foods repeat themselves everywhere, reliably. Wherever you are in Penang, you can usually find the entirety of Malaysian street food on offer. The scenarios in which you'll encounter these foods repeat themselves, too. Once you stop fretting about where you'll find the best, you'll begin to see the patterns emerging from the shrimp-paste-covered chaos, and the cornucopian abundance becomes a very enjoyable problem to tackle.
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