Saturday June 27, 2009

Ipoh’s mother-lode of liew

By ALEXANDRA WONG

Where can you find the best liew — that savoury delicacy that is as integral to Ipoh as fish and chips are to London? Visit Gunung Rapat.

Food reviewing is a dream job, yes?

You get to stuff your face silly, somebody else picks up the tab, and then you get paid again for writing about it. What’s not to like?

On the other hand, you occasionally get your ear yanked by readers who are livid that you had the gall to omit their favourite gem.

“How can you leave out the liew stall in Gunung Rapat?” Kris demands when she gets a copy of the Perak Good Food Guide, which I contributed to.

“It’s practically a legend!”

Like every other true-blue Ipohite I know, my will is hopelessly weak where liew — that local catch-all for deep-fried or boiled items stuffed with fish paste — is concerned. As synonymous with Ipoh as fish and chips are with London, liew can be found at every noodle stall in town, even the school canteens.

Kwong Hong coffee shop in Gunung Rapat. — ALEXANDRA WONG

At the crack of the recess bell, my classmates and I used to mob the liew stall, fighting for the biggest pieces, which we then ate with blanched noodles with soya sauce, or dunked in piping hot curry, sweet-sour laksa soup, or a clear anchovy broth.

The happiest parts of my primary schooldays were those precious 15 minutes spent sitting on long wooden benches, chomping away at crunchy pieces of liew that had just come out of the wok.

“How does it compare to the Big Tree?” I ask carefully.

Where liew is concerned, Big Tree at Pasir Pinji has long been the unofficial Gold Standard, drawing even Kuala Lumpur food hounds in droves.

“Can’t hold a candle to this!” Kris bellows. “If there is a version two of your book, you better put this place in!”

Ergo, in the name of atoning for my unforgivable omission, we end up barrelling through lunch-hour traffic to this hitherto unheralded liew place. And because we may not get the choicest liew by late afternoon (“they sell very fast,” Kris emphasises), we’re hightailing there at noon, when the sun is at its hottest. The things we gluttons do for food, I think as I wipe my sweaty brow with a tissue.

As we approach the Gunung Rapat wet market, she points out a corner shop diagonally across. True to her words, the crowd is already spilling onto the street.

“Why don’t you go in first?” she suggests gently. “I’ll join you after parking. Then you can secure a table before it gets even more packed.”

I leap out of the car, slam the door, sprint across the road, and do a double-take. At the shop front, a wiry, grey-haired man is tossing noodles over a roaring stove, surrounded by an array of bulging baskets and heaped trays laid out buffet-style on the baine-marie shelf.

I recognise standard offerings like stuffed brinjal, bitter gourd, white and brown tofu, ladies’ finger and capsicum, but . . . what are these ingenious pairings I’d never even dreamt possible?

There is stuffed broccoli, lotus root, baby corn, oyster mushroom, kangkung, seaweed . . . I lose count after the 20th variant or so. It’s like some mad culinary scientist had woken up in the night, feverish with inspiration, and went gaga stuffing every imaginable vegetable you could get from the market with fish paste.

“What is this?” I gesture at a basket of unassuming-looking, pale-brown spheres roughly the size of lychees.

The large, innovative selection of liew found at Kwong Hong coffee shop in Gunung Rapat. — ALEXANDRA WONG

“That’s starch ball stuffed with har mai (dried prawns),” says the pig-tailed lass minding the trays.

It doesn’t sound terribly sexy, but the balls seem to be disappearing as soon as a new batch is refilled, so I duly pick one. Ooh. Salty, chewy and punctuated with smoky hints of finely minced cuttlefish as well as crispy har mai, this Plain Jane holds its own among the other kap liew brethren.

Now I know why my mother always says har mai is a Chinese cook’s best friend — it has the uncanny knack of adding a pungent kick to savoury dishes, whether it’s the topping on woo thau kow (yam cake), or simple fried rice.

“Miss, what would you like?” the liew-minder asks.

While I’d stood there taking my sweet time gawking, a line of glaring customers has formed behind me.

I hastily select half a dozen pieces of liew and order kon loe min to go with them — that would be dry-tossed yellow noodles splashed with sesame oil and soya sauce, topped with deep fried shallots and blanched bean sprouts. The weather is too hot for curry soup, even though ordinarily, it is an even more popular partner-in-crime with liew.

“He used to sell out of a roadside stall,” Kris apprises when we finally tuck into our lunch proper.

“Same road here, outside one of those quaint Chinese village houses. Even then, he was doing very brisk business. If word gets out to the KL-ites, they will fly here, man.”

I chuckle in agreement, thinking of my KL friends who bravely endure three-hour journeys for bean sprout chicken and dim sum. If only they knew these tourist staples constituted only the tip of Ipoh’s gastronomic iceberg.

The real home favourites fly under the radar, ensconced in down-to-earth, mom-and-pop shops at the housing estates and new villages on the city’s outskirts. Forget air-con, these local gems are best enjoyed in open air settings, amidst the teeming, sweaty crowds gobbling their food with relish.

Within these cosy neighbourhoods, food books or newspaper reviews are no match for word of mouth. Very often, by the time the townies discover these secret gems, they’re already doing a roaring trade without so much as a whisper of media buzz. Which is why, some petty traders actually look pained when you eagerly ask them if they’d like to be reviewed.

“More work for me!” is a typically tart retort.

As I bite into my stuffed brinjal, I crane my neck and squint at the baine marie area. Another tray of stuffed items has just been brought out of the kitchen. Stuffed enoki mushrooms? Gee, whatever would they think of next?

Forget Apple. This is what I call innovation.

Kedai Kopi Kwong Hong
Non-halal
684, Main Road
Gunung Rapat, Ipoh
Tel: 012-5063296
Open: noon to 5pm,closed Mondays