Cheap Thai at Mangrove Food Court, Tanjung Tokong

Xmas Day mid-morning: Frantic search for smoked salmon for party dish later that night. Where has all the smoked salmon gone in Penang? Giant, Cold Storage Gurney Plaza, OK food store in Pulau Tikus, nada! Last stop was Cold Storage at Island Plaza, but before I headed back home to prep, we decided to satisfy our Thai craving, cheap and on the double, in the Tanjung Tokong neighbourhood.

The unusually named Mangrove Food Court is located within the Prima Tanjung shophouse enclave. It houses a dubiously luminous repertoire of famed Penang favourites - Carnavon St Char Koay Teow, Penang Road Assam Laksa, Taman Kuda Popiah, just to name a few. The legitness of the name-dropping remains to be seen.

The food court also has a curious number of Thai food stalls; a small Thai community of hawkers seemed to have found it opportune to congregate here. I decided on the Thai Koay Teow soup from one stall, having been missing the delicious herb-laden variant on Bangkok streets. It arrived looking like THIS.

Gah!!! Can anything scream terminal illness more? I am vehemently against eating local koay teow soup and this one looks nothing like its Thai counterpart. Luckily, one thing Thai this stall did nail (apart from the lilting sing-song accent) was the 4-condiment caddy.

Add a generous spoonful of this...

and more of this...

...and we have a spicy, near-Thai experience!

It's not breakfast in Banglamphu but it's several notches up from that bowl of soporific boredom that was initially served.

Sweet Pork Rice (RM4.50) from another stall. This one was quite lovely - the pork slices, heavily coated in sweet dark soy and garlic worked beautifully with plain white rice.

Also from the same stall, we got the seafood glass noodle salad (RM5). This one was a bit of a hit and miss, too much glass noodle, too heavy on the onions and the bird's eye chilli. My nose was running halfway ploughing through this sedate looking thing.

Oh and by the way, negatory on the pursuit of smoked salmon for potato skins. Either Penang folks have completely wiped the supply out over Xmas or the supermarkets didn't care to keep them ont their shelves. No great damage done, I substituted with bacon instead! :-)