Tong Lek 8 Cafe - another legend in the making

Son numero uno recommended this place to muah last night .

He told me " since you like tomyam right ? you should go try out this place "

Well here we are this morning .

He had described the fish as 

" tasting like fried chicken " .

I can't deny that it does look like fried chicken from afar , however after taking a few bites , I do have to say , that the garoupa meat tastes like the fish batter found in fish and chips .

Now why didn't anyone think of that before eh ?

My bowl of white tomyam . Clear , very hot , aromatically combustive , sourish , robust omg yes , I love this so much ! For those of you who do not know Penang that much , I'd like you to know that Penang cuisine is heavily influenced by Thai cuisine and wherever there is Thai food , not only does it attract the local Thai community , we want in on the action too ! 

If you notice , all the bowls have no fish meat in them because , the meat is served in a separate bowl which they combined into one for us .

This here is the regular Fish noodle soup .

While that is a pork offal noodle .

I usually turn my nose up at any hawker stall who professes that they can cook 3 different noodles . 

In most cases , they only specialise in one and fail spectacularly in the others .

Not so in the case of Tong Lek 8 .

The offal is just cooked and so fresh , it can match the old backlane night hawker at Kampung Malabar .

Nobody comes close to that . Thus for them to even be able to replicate the standards set by that roadside sifu is such a near impossible feat , yet they've done it !

Bewildered and semi jealous because hawker fare is something we cannot replicate at home , I confronted the very humble lady 

" Kom panai chee geh lei tei ? "

( you can converse in Cantonese in the inner city folks , hokkien not needed if they are Teochew or Cantonese to begin with )

She told me this

" We are just the second generation . But we owe it all to our old folks .  "

For those of you who cannot read Chinese , there is a picture menu .

Here are the directions to this new legend in the making .

Location : Macalister Road , Penang 

Opening hours : 7 am to 2.30 pm