Ken Lim surveys the Friday-night crowd at Penang, the Malaysian restaurant his family owns in Chinatown. All the tables are full, and a line stretches outside the front door even though it’s past nine. “That’s a Filipino family,” Lim says, pointing to a table of ten. “The grandparents bring everyone here to taste home cooking. And over there, that couple is Indian–they’re eating our appetizer roti canai, which is an Indian-style pancake you can dip into a curry chicken sauce. We also get Vietnamese, Thais, Indonesians, and Malays. And Chinese, of course. And non-Asians who like very spicy food. Very diverse, like in my hometown of Penang.”
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Malaysian dishes, Lim says, have been enriched by tropical spices and waves of colonization and immigration. The southern half of the Malay Peninsula, which makes up the larger portion of Malaysia (the smaller is the northern strip of the island of Borneo), is believed to have been part of a Buddhist kingdom that flourished between the 7th and 14th centuries and occupied much of Indonesia as well. In the early 1400s, what is now the city of Melaka became a center of maritime commerce. Perhaps to court Muslim traders from India and the Middle East, its rulers converted to Islam, which is still Malaysia’s official religion.
The Penang empire grew to encompass five restaurants in the New York area and another in Atlanta. The family decided last year to open a branch in the midwest. “We found out that this space in Chinatown was available,” Lim says. “We signed a lease right away and spent six months renovating. And my mom and uncle put me in charge.” Lim thinks their success is due to the hard-to-find Malay and Hakka fare. He singles out kambing rendang (lamb cooked in a sauce of coconut milk spiced with chili, cinnamon, and cloves), kacang pender belacan (string beans sauteed in a spicy shrimp paste), pangan ikan (barbecued fish baked in banana leaves–ask for stingray), and mango chicken as among his favorites.
