“Arguably the best Penang char kway teow in town. The trick to a good char kway teow is to keep the portions small – and that’s what the chefs do as you can see them replenishing the buffet every so often. One can’t take short cuts with this dish that needs to be throughly wokked. Penang Place does a version with no pork or lard – so it’s quite impressive that they can create the right taste without these indulgent ingredients.”

Fans who used to make the long trek to their former Jurong address will be thrilled with their convenient location at Suntec City*. Chefs from Penang dish up the best Penang Char Kway Teow in town with a heody wok hei, And they don’t use pork or lard in their dishes.

SPECIAL! The big draw is their buffet where you can sample Penang Hokkien Mee, Penang talcs°, Rojak and more.

“At a time when most hotel buffets start from around $50, Penang Place is not only cheap but the food quality is excellent and they offer a unique spread of Penang food which is not easily available elsewhere! Their Penang char kway teow is very good and has the requisite wok hei aroma when it arrives at the table. It is part of the buffet, but they make it a point to fry it fresh a few times during the buffet service. To make up for the lack of pork lard, Chef Alvin uses oil that is used for frying the chicken to fry the kway teow so that it still has flavour.

Make sure you leave room for desserts because they are one of the highlights of the meal there. All their kuehs are made in-house by Chef Alvin and he even makes his own kaya the traditional way, slowly stirring it over a low fire for hours!”

Walking into Penang Place with Paul Ooi is like stepping into his family home.

It is a little more than an hour to the lunch-time opening as he leads the way into his establishment at Suntec City.

He stops often to greet his staff, even taking time to introduce them to this Salt&Light writer – in very much the same way you would, when you bring friends home to visit.

“It was a scary time. My family prayed a lot.”
Nicely groomed and dressed in khaki twilled cotton slacks, 64-year-old Ooi looks every inch the modern successful restauranteur you would come across in glossy magazines.

Penang food fans who know their chilli boh from their sambal will still head for even though the place has is a tad too far out of town for real accessibility.

This is where you will find the best Penang hawker buffet in town, and one reason it has managed to do it is because of its large team of Penang chefs.

At a recent catered event, it showed that it could still dish up very good Hokkien mee and Assam laksa even outside of its restaurant, and the two chefs working the woks for char kway teow delivered two quite different styles – one version was wetter while the other was a bit too charred.

At the restaurant however, the fried rice noodle dish has the requisite wok-hei and a well-balanced flavour, and you wouldn’t know that there’s no lard used.