I am surprised that other food bloggers also agree that the place is over rated. It is so popular and was packed with customers. Yet, all they offer is some lousy looking economy rice stall and a duck noodle stall. Plus some chicken biscuits. BTW, the chicken biscuit minus the lardy bits is not nice also. It is no longer crispy and oozing with lard. Just hard pieces of biscuits with strong flavour of red fermented bean cake (ang tau joo).

However, if you are a city boy, then, you may like the rustic feel of a small pekan like Bidor where people sell fruits like fresh guavas, jambu air and etc by the roadside. When I was there, they also sell rambutans. I thought it is not rambutan season at the moment?

Now, I am much smarter and will not believe food blogers 100%. Ten may write that the foods are so yummy, so nice, so sedap, so great but all I need is one to tell me the truth.

The location is at the corner of Penang Street (not Penang Road) and Church Street and it is open to the office crowd.

There is a stall that was featured by newspapers and magazines, looking at the clippings on their greasy stall. They sell Hakka pork which tastes like the kai chai peng (chicken biscuit). The pork is crunchy and chewy. Too bad that I had a painful jaw and couldn’t enjoy much.

The same stall also sells various types of wantan mee and from the look of it, their wantan mee is very popular. I ordered one drunken chicken wantan mee and the portion is big with generous amounts of chicken. I can’t remember the price but I think it is RM4.50.

I like going to this coffee shop for its koay teow th’ng and roti bakar as well. Lately, most of my hawker foods reviews are posted on Penang Foods but I will keep this blog running with pork recipes.

Over here in Penang, we only have a few stalls selling Pan Mee and all of them usually call their stall Sabah Pan Meen. When I was in Sabah, I actually did not find a single stall selling Pan Mee. Then again, I didn’t go to that many hawker places so I cannot be sure.

So, does anyone know if Pan Mee is really from Sabah or is it called that way because the noodle uses Sabah chai or sayur manis?

Pan Mee is not noodle in pan but rather ‘pan’ means slab as in slab of thick slices of things? It is made of flour and hand torn into pieces. Very much like Italian pasta. The flour pieces are then boiled and served with a soup made of anchovies. Sabah vegetable, crispy fried anchovies and black fungus are used as garnishes.

The above pan mee is from the Jalan Air Putih (off Jalan Air Itam) morning market. There are two coffee shops but I have forgotten which coffee shop it is. It is quite good and in fact, the only edible pan mee I can find around Penang. The soup is sweet and the noodle/pan mee very QQ.

In as much as I want to stick with healthy eating, there are occasion when I tell myself that ‘eat or not eat, also die’ so I eat.

So, I still have that occasional lok-lok. These are tiny sticks of different kind of foods strung on bamboo sticks, dipped into a boiling pot of water and then, dunk into various sauces.

Though I try to stick to the more ‘natural’ foods like the above fish cake wrapped around coriander leaves (yummmm), I must have a stick or two of bloodied cockles and liver.

Some good lok-lok stalls or pushcarts have so many types of sauces like tomyam, satay, super hot green chillies, sweet sauce and garlic and lime chillies sauce.

I just hope that one day, I don’t regret having those sticks of possibly cancer causing foods like the cockles and livers.

I don’t have the heart to ask the uncle to set up a table just for me alone. So, I took a bunch of these super geli, super icky innards and bloodied foods.

These consist of fallopian tube (or at least that’s what they told me) of the swine. It is not intestine but some crispy tube, kidney, cockles, mantis prawns, squids and some shell fish. All these will probably shorten my life by several years. Besides these, are the pig’s ears, century eggs, all parts of the pigs, prawns, fish, meat and many quirky stuffs.

The above sticks of funny and weird looking foods will be immersed in hot, boiling water and then, dipped into these sauce. It is one of the most enjoyable way of eating.

The above is how lok-lok, or in English means dip-dip look like. We have a table with a huge pot of boiling water in the middle and plenty of foods stuffs to be cooked on our own.

Those who do not have a strong stomach may need to make a run for the toilet the next day. But over here, our guts are handled to deal with anything.