Hawker Food in Penang

Mini-shop with mostly baked goods right on the back of his motorbike
Hawker stalls at Batu Ferringhi

We bought some fresh fruit at this stall

This is the interesting soup/drink stall I describe in the post. Fruit marinated in water and sugar. Many bees are seen flying around these bins.

I was looking forward to eating the kind of food we used to eat at Banana Leaf in Milipitas. There is definitely no dearth of street food otherwise known as hawker food in Malaysia. Even at 11pm at night, the stalls are packed with people. The problem is that vegetarian food is difficult to find at these stalls, meat and seafood dishes in Chinese, Malaysian, Indian or Western style are readily available. I'm not very familiar with the Chinese and Malay hawker food but nasi kandak, nasi goreng, nasi lemak are the rice based Indian style dishes along with roti prata and roti canai that are found at many of the stalls. One night, we did venture out and order a roti canai but it was not the same as the roti prata at Banana Leaf. We were able to sample rojak, the cut fruit that is found at many of the corner stalls. If you look at the picture, there is an interesting drink or soup that was highly popular among the Chinese and local Indians, they mixed a number of items in it, juice, noodles, some sauces, pearls and lots and lots of crushed ice, served in a plastic bag with a spoon. In general, most of the drinks in Malaysia seem to be sold with ice including coffee and tea and the drinks are served in plastic bags with straws and rubber bands. Many of the locals walk around sipping some drink or another out of these bags. Food was more enjoyable than Bali but we were happy to be back in India to relish what is familiar to us.