Saturday morning yum cha today - I met up with a trio of local Penangite friends for a dim sum breakfast at Red Tea House.
My first time here - a very casual spot that’s popular among the locals in Bayan Baru, a densely-populated working-class suburb just half an hour’s drive away from my place:
Penang’s population is largely Hokkien/Fujianese, so Cantonese dim sum is never the forte of this state. Red Tea House offered a wide range of dim sum, which made this place quite interesting, but, taste-wise, it’s far behind the top two dim sum places in Penang: Hong Xing @ Precinct 10 and Sea Queen @ Straits Quay.
Address
Red Tea House (紅茶館)
Lucasark Heritage Food Court
56, Lorong Nipah 4, Taman Lip Sin, 11900 Bayan Lepas, Penang, Malaysia
Tel: +60 12-461 8959
Opening hours: 6am to 2pm, daily
Not spicy here - the majority of their clientele are Chinese (not Straits Chinese like me who’d have preferred a bit of chili spice), so the dumplings won’t have any spice worked in, but hot chili sauce would be provided as a dip on the side.
That said, the flavorings/condiments (soy sauce, fish sauce, oyster sauce, etc.) used in preparing the dim sum items were more heavy-handed than the Cantonese would do - to satisfy the mainly Hokkien clientele here.
How times have changed! My most enduring memory about eating in Hong Kong was during a 3-week business trip there in 1993. I was one of 3 staff sent from Singapore Airlines’ head office to review our HK offices’ processes.
SIA had a main HK office in Queensway, one ticketing office in Central, and an airport office in Kai Tak.
The biggest challenge the 3 of us faced during the entire trip was looking for chilis, any chili!
For years afterwards, I never went back to HK again without bringing my own supply of chili condiments.
This is still a very small minority that likes spicy food. With Sichuan food and also XO sauce getting popular on tables, people eats a bit more, well, compared to the French.
