Review: Pudu Wai Sek Kai

This is by no means a comprehensive guide to Jalan Sayur aka Pudu Wai Sek Kai. You'll find better luck at HungryGoWhere and OpenRice. It is difficult to try everything when it's just two people =( Regardless of how gluttonous they are.

First thing my guide brought me to was the fried chicken stall. Selling only fried chicken, the selection available was mind boggling. While KFC offers you drumstick, thighs, wings, breasts, this stall goes the full monty. The feet isn't spared. Heck, even the carcass is fried. I would usually buy the chicken carcass to boil soup because it's the cheapest. Chicken feet is something of a guilty pleasure as it's all just skin and bones and skin and bones. Possibly no nutritional value at all. Growing up, my family would order steamed chicken feet during dim sum excursions but I wouldn't touch it. Yes, I was a very picky eater as a child. In the later years, I did try it once or twice and found that it wasn't so bad but the reality I was eating chicken skin was just a little unnerving so I stopped. Unfortunately, Thai mango kerabu salad is tad bit difficult to give up like that ex who broke my heart. Maybe it's the Thai flavors; the sweetness, the savory anchovies, the crunchy raw mango.

We opted for the safer parts. My Chinese dialects are deplorable. At best for asking "how much" and the numeric, after cursing. People say that foul words are the first things you learn when picking up a new language. Luckily (or not), my German skills are still confined to basic daily conversations that don't include calling someone's mother a whore or they are a slut.

I know enough what drumstick and wings are in Cantonese (kai bei and kai yik respectively). The rest don't register in my brain because Jaya Grocer usually labels them in  English. While we were eating, my tour guide stared at me....
i thought you ordered the drumstick? 
yea.
why are you eating mine? thought you didn't like it. 


Truth be told, I didn't really know which part of the chicken I was eating then. Merely eating what was on the plate as they looked, tasted pretty much the same. Guess I qualify for a tong sampah.

Not sure if we were there late (close to 8pm) for a Wednesday but most of the stalls were either closed or closing. One thing that I don't quite like is most of the signboards here are in Chinese only. If Google Translate could snap a picture and translate it, that would be very handy, don't you think so too? Unfortunately, both of us were Chinese illiterate and had to make do with going for the usual suspects or ask the owners what they sell. This one is the pork innards soup.

There is just something nice in a bowl of hot pepper soup that's been doused with lots of pepper and bits of vegetables. There are lean and fatty pork, stomach, liver, intestines etc. We Chinese certainly cull our pigs to its optimal use. The blood isn't spared either but I can't stomach that. Don't worry, it isn't drank in its liquid form out of a Chinese tea cup like vampires.

This soup fell short as I usually prefer it to be more peppery hot. Still, it was a nice soup and as a soup lover, you probably shouldn't listen to my (biased) opinion on (any) soup.

Tour guide's personal favorite: grilled sotong with rojak sauce. The stall is manned by an elderly Chinese woman helped by a foreign worker. Penang's move to ban foreign  chef has left many condemning the move which surprised me as I do agree to that having foreign chefs would somehow make one question the authenticity of the dish. Of course, one may argue that the original chefs would have handed down the required skills and imparted the necessary knowledge for them to be at the helm. Still, it does give a rather odd image. Just go to Ipoh and you will find more foreigners cooking your favorite bowl of noodles. To me, that was just a little odd as Ipoh has often strike me as that friendly neighbourhood joint for simple Chinese food cooked by elderly Chinese folks. So maybe the elderly folks are dead and the not-so elderly folks are not-so keen to continue with business. A sad state of affair if I may say so.

Actually, the best example would be our very own Chinatown, Petaling Street. The place is literally overrun, managed, manned by Bangladeshis that I sometimes wonder, who is the real tourist there? Me or them?

You can smell the whiffs of dried sotong on the charcoal grills in the air. Everything is done (slowly and probably painstakingly) by hand. The cost of this isn't that high but this is RM 15. You get pieces of the grilled sotong, few stuffed grilled bean curd topped with chopped peanuts, drizzled with rojak sauce. I like the bean curds more as it wasn't as pungent. Plus it was healthier and I didn't want to incur the wrath of my tour guide for eating his beloved and risk having to hitchhike my way back home T_T

Char kway teow with salted egg. Since we were already there on a culinary adventure, why not? My tour guide was skeptical about it but gave it a go and true enough, he didn't like it much. Somehow, the saltiness from the egg overshadowed the wok hei of the noodles, subduing the overall flavor. I think it's best to order the real McCoy for this one.