Penang, Washington, D.C.

Last night my Tulsa friend Tony and I went to dinner at Penang, a Malaysian restaurant on M Street in the West End. It turned out to be quite a nice place while still maintaining the affordability common to other Malaysian places in town. The restaurant is on the corner of the intersection in an interesting low building with a Mexican quasi-fast food place on the half-below ground floor and Penang half a flight up. One enters the restaurant through a dark but very contemporary feeling bar area. To the left is a small raised seating area where diners have a view of the kitchen through large windows. Straight ahead through the bar is the main dining room, where a wide variety of contemporary table and chair designs were scattered spaciously throughout the room. Pendant lights and other interesting fixtures provided soft lighting, and a window wall gave a view of the street half a floor below. We were seated at a banquette table along one wall, and I got the free-standing chair, finding it comfortable once I was in it, but it was really quite a bit too low for someone of my great height and advanced age.

Menus were several pages, featuring mostly Malaysian items, but also foods inspired by the cuisines of India, Thailand, and other Asian countries. Tony started with the seafood tomyam soup. It was a pretty red curry broth filled with interesting pieces of mushrooms and an assortment of shrimp, scallops, and squid, served in a deep square bowl. I had the Penang salad. This was a very large plate filled with an assortment of very interesting greens, including a lot of the "bitter" leaves, including raddicchio and frisee, tossed in an usual sweet-sour dressing. A few slices of tender, cooked octopus were tossed in with the greens.

For our main courses, Tony had a seafood chow fun, a large bowl of flat rice noodles with shrimp, scallops, squid, vegetables, and eggs in a whitish-clear sauce they called an "egg gravy."



My dish was fascinating: sarang burung. This was an intriguing dish where they had taken taro root, cooked it some, formed it into a sort of bowl or hat shape, and fried it so it would be able to hold other food items. Inside the taro bowl were scallops, squid, shrimp, baby corn, carrots, black mushrooms, purple onions, cashews, and red and green bell peppers and all of this sat on a scattering of crispy rice noodles with really long strands of carrot threads garnishing the whole dish. It was delicious. That fried taro root had the texture of potatoes and the lightly fried portions had a great crunch and flavor. If you've never had sarang burung, you've got to go to Penang.



It was just a quickie meal, but Penang turned out to be so nice and with such delicious food, there are several people I'm going to have to take there to experience their cuisine. Looking around the other tables, there were a lot of beautiful and unusual looking plates, so I've a lot to look forward to.