Part 4 of Trip to Penang 2007 - Seafood @ Bali Hai, Gurney Drive

Finally! Its the last post for my trip to Penang last month. We were actually planning on going to either Gertak Sanggul for our finale. But because we have been stuffing ourselves silly throughout the day, we only started looking for dinner at about 10pm. Gertak Sanggul would definately be closed by the time we found our way there.

A quick call to -Wasabi King- rectified the problem. He said, why drive? Walk down the road from your hotel, find Bali Hai and if its seafood you're looking for, Bali Hai is it!!

True enough, we found Bali Hai just down the road from our hotel (Gurney Hotel). Looked popular as there was alot of people. Whats nice is that they have tanks and tanks of live seafood!! Me and the Canadian were contemplating which lobsters to order but decided not to when the others were looking funny at us! :p Anyway, enough blabbering, on to the food!!

First dish to arrive was the fried squid. A staple favorite at any seafood dinner. The version here was good! The coating flour has specks of black pepper which did wonders for the flavor and the squid itself was cooked to perfection, not too tough and not too underdone as well.

Next dish was the spinach in superior stock (siong tong yuen choy). Unlike other versions that I've had, this one had normal chicken eggs, salted duck eggs and century eggs in them. Was suppose to balance out all the seafood but it turn out to be cholesterol laden. Which is SUPERB!!! Penang folks would say, SUIIIIII!!

The next dish to arrive was the steamed "kappa". "Kappa" is actually a shell fish closely resembling lala. This dish was steamed with lots and lots of breath enhancing garlic and chillies. It was so good we were scooping up the "soup" to eat with copious amounts of rice.

The last dish to arrive was the crabs!! The local mud crabs were cooked in a luscious mixture of salted duck eggs. Another cholesterol laden dish but it was as if we cared!! :D This dish gave the steamed "kappa" a run for its money!!

Now I did say last dish when explaining the crabs didnt I? Let me explain, since we were still quite full, we decided that 4 dishes were enough. But after the crabs, we thought we better order another dish to balance the sinful meal we just had.

So, we ordered the scallops with broccoli!! Actually, to be honest, we ordered this because we say many tables having it and it looked really good! When it arrived, we were quite pleased with the generous amounts of scallops. Every was just cooked to perfection, the scallops were exquisitely fresh, the broccoli nice and crunchy which just made for a heavenly dish.

With this post, the Trip to Penang 2007 series has ended. Its probably the only series that Makan Kings has ever started and finished properly. I hope everyone enjoyed this series and we hope to bring you more in the future.

GPS coordinates:
Its along Jalan Gurney. That should be enough to get you there!! :p

Makan King's ratings = 7.5 out of 10

Cheers,
-BKT King-