Penang Garden Restaurant, San Francisco

728 Washington Street (at Kearny), San Francisco, California
Hours: 11am-10pm (Sun-Thur), 11am-10.30pm (Fri & Sat)
http://www.penanggarden.com

We had dinner at Penang Garden today -- according to my Penangite and KL-ite friends, it’s supposed to the best Malaysian food around. We’ve been disappointed a few times before so we figured, oh well, what’s one more. Haha, Zhuang says that the most difficult food critic to please is definitely a Penangite tasting Malaysian food abroad. The restaurant’s called Penang Garden but it serves Malaysian, Thai and Singaporean (oh pleeeeease!) cuisine. The place is either run by people from KL or Ipoh coz they were speaking Cantonese and the menu was in Cantonese too. Oh, it also had a HILLARIOUSLY misspelled mini menu on the table -- we laughed soooo hard that I absolutely had to nick it and keep it as a souvenir. More later on, now back to the meat of the review!

This is what the two of us had for dinner, total of $29.08 excluding tips:
Lor Bak
Char Koay Teow
Penang Asam Laksa
ABC for dessert

The main dishes were close to authentic and worth the price, at $7.95 each, pretty big portions too. Char Koay Teow -- yummy :) Best Char Koay Teow I’ve had so far outside of Malaysia (the Banana Island in Westlake San Francisco one sucks, apparently the one in Penang Restaurant Chicago is pretty bad too). Only complain was that it wasn’t burnt enough although it did have the wok smell. Oh, also, for true blue Char Koay Teow fans, be forewarned that it doesn’t come with cockle shell “ham” or fried pork fat. Ask for extra spicy if you like it hot. According to Zhuang, the Asam Laksa was very authentic (in the words of a Penangite, “look like drain water, smell like drain water”) but he had to ask for extra prawn paste, “heh kor.” The noodles were good although not as fat as the ones back home. Plenty of fish. Definitely be adventurous and try the Asam Laksa if you’ve never tried it.

Stay away from the Lor Bak coz all we got was Bak (meat), no Lor. Lor is a starchy egg-white deep with soy sauce that gives it a dark brown color. Love it coz it’s sweet and when you dip the salty Lor Bak (meat rolls) into it, yummy! However, that wasn’t the case at Penang Garden. Although for $6.95 we got two small pieces of Lor Bak, one tiny piece of Heh Chi (prawn fritter), one Tau Kua (deep fried chinese tofu), half a century egg with pickled ginger and cucumber. I failed this dish coz it was served without Lor (gasp!) which I think is a sin! You can’t call a dish Lor Bak if you’re only serving it with ONLY chilli sauce (pretty good, not the usual Tupai brand one, it was sweet and slightly vinegar-y.) The Heh Chi was *sticks tongue out* couldn’t taste the shrimp at all! The photo of the Lor Bak had the Lor, but when we asked about the sauce several times, some suspiciously didn’t know what we were talking about (of which we then asked, “You’re not Malaysian, right?” followed by blank nods) and some just said they didn’t have it.

As for the ABC, you have to remember that I’m a Penang girl, which means I was spoilt for choice back home -- it was ais kacang any day at Swatow Lane and cendol at Penang Road -- and the only time I had to resort to ABC was when I had midnight cravings for sweet ice shaving, meaning I would get them at the local mamak. The ABC was okay but I wouldn’t definitely not order it again, coz it wasn’t very impressive (no red beans, no green wormy stuff in cendol and it had a lot of funny colored jelly stuff that were tasteless). Also, Penang Garden has a good variety on the dessert menu, stuff like fried banana with ice-cream, fried ice-cream, mango with glutinous rice, pulut hitam and bubur chacha. There’s also a good dessert place a few blocks up from Penang Garden that has really really good Taufu Fa (sweet tofu) with ginger. I think the place is called Hang Ah and the serving is huge.

Service was good, food came fast and I think they open late coz we arrived at around 9pm and stayed till 10:15pm and they were still serving and taking orders from people who came in around 10:20pm. I would definitely go back to Penang Garden again, it’s cheaper and what we’ve had tastes better than Banana Island in West Lake and nearer than Spice Islands in Palo Alto. There’s parking at the Portsmouth Square Garage near Penang Garden but you can probably find free street parking if you go later than dinner time - we did! I think we’re gonna try something more outrageous on the menu next time. They have a dish that’s called Special Coffee Short Rib, Strawberry Short Rib and a dish that’s supposedly Durian doubled-boiled with Chicken. Interesting...

By the way, the person who wrote the menu or designed the web site needs to take spelling lessons. Just for fun, check out the Penang Garden Web site and see how many bloops they made. I love accidental humor! So far, we’ve found “Directoins,” “Pork, Brief and Lamb” and “King Pork Buff.”

Check out the menu that I "borrowed" from the restaurant at This is a Real Menu. or check out my primary blog.