July 1, 2010 at 1:39 am

I decided to order chicken porridge when I was having brunch one morning with my eating buddy Yoichi. When my order came, he looked at it and said, “I like the bowl”. It was the old-fashioned kind of design that Penang food operators used which was popular 30 years ago. These bowls are ceramic and there are pictures of cockerels or fishes on them. The ones with cockerels are often in colour while the bowls with fishes are usually monochrome – blue, to be precise.

So, I told him exactly that – these are old-fashioned (and not really sophisticated in my humble opinion), to which he replied, “Yes, I know and I like it”. As soon as he said that, I remembered something he had told me almost two years ago, also about the design on bowls. This time it was fishes. We were eating beef soup noodles at the Lam Ah kopitiam at the corner of Beach Street and Chulia Street.

Having often seen these designs, I usually paid them no mind, but he told me the fish was a coelacanth, a huge prehistoric fish that was thought to have been extinct, only to be caught and rediscovered in the middle of the 20th century. I was sceptical, but he was so convincing, I was tempted to believe him.

Besides, it was not a good time to be debating with him, as my beef soup noodles looked really good and I wanted to eat it. I ordered beef soup with koay teow, soft flat rice noodles. Other than koay teow, you can get yellow noodles, commonly known as “mee”, or rice to go with your beef soup.

Beef Noodle Soup

Beef soup comes with various cuts of meat. There is what the proprietor calls muscle meat, lean meat, two or three kinds of beef meatballs, and offal, namely, stomach and tendon. Customers can order a bowl of mixed meat or choose whichever cuts they want. The meat is boiled to perfection; it is never overcooked or undercooked for that matter, making it tender and succulent. It’s great with the chilli dip, which is made from 12 – 13 spices and ingredients.

The soup itself is excellent. It is a clear soup that tastes as good as it looks. It is not oily, nor does it have that strong gamey flavour generally associated with red meat like beef and mutton. This, however, does not mean that it is bland. Far from it, in fact. The soup is rich without being cloying and flavourful without being overpowering. It does not have excessive flavour enhancers as we never get thirsty after having our beef soup noodles. Everything, from the meat to the soup, is extremely tasty. This speaks volumes about the effort and care that go into the preparation.

Lots of our foreign friends like the beef soup noodles – my mother’s friends, Mr. and Mrs. Nihei, Mr. and Mrs. Iwasaki, Mr. and Mrs. Yamamoto from Japan think this is the best beef soup noodle place in Penang. My friends, Mariamalia from Costa Rica and Luane from the States also liked it very much.

Ms. Theng

The lady who runs the stall is Ms. Theng and she has running this stall for 14 years. The kopitiam looks old; it has marble topped tables and mismatched chairs. No air-conditioning, but there are fans. It can get slightly warm and humid in Penang’s tropical weather…and seeing that it is located at a busy intersection which is one of the main arteries in Penang, let’s just say that one should not expect the place to be quiet. Nevertheless, the atmosphere of the place does not affect its popularity as it does roaring business everyday.

The stall is ready serve customers from Monday to Saturday from around 10.30am until around 4pm, but sometimes they finish earlier, too. They close on Sunday and public holidays. It is always crowded at lunch time and it is sometimes impossible to get a table but people are content to wait for a one, anyway.

Beef Noodle Soup Restaurant

Ms. Theng’s beef soup noodle stall is not difficult to find; in fact, it is extremely easy as it is located at the corner of a busy intersection in the business district of Penang, just across the street from the Beach Street fire station, a two-storey pre-war house that never fails to remind me of an American fire station. This part of Penang is full of old buildings, commonly called “pre-war buildings”. “Pre-war” here means “pre-World War II” but in actual fact, the buildings here are much older with some dating back to the late 19th century. You can see architectural designs ranging from aesthetic Eastern/Chinese to stately European colonial.

The architecture is interesting, but when I have my bowl of hot beef soup koay teow in front of me, I forget about my surroundings. I can even give up a good debate, as I did with Yoichi. I did, however, pick it up with him later, but he would not budge and to this day, I cannot be entirely sure if the fish on the bowl the beef soup noodles are served in is the coelacanth, the carp or the catfish.

Tags: Beef, Food, Malaysia, Noodles, Penang, Soup, Travel