How can you not try something called "Beard Papa"?

[khiemtran]

The best part about visiting Malaysia is, of course, the food. And the best part of the food is the comfort food.

None of it is particularly good for you. Consider, for example, char kway teow. Char kway teow, done properly, is basically rice noodles fried in pork fat, laced with other ingredients (including other types of fat) and charred with carcinogenic goodness. It's wonderful.

Or there's nasi lemak, which is to a simple meal of curry and rice what a hamburger with the lot is to a plain sandwich. The extra richness comes from coconut milk added to the rice. The name, in Malay, means "fat rice".

Or Hokkien-style roast pork, blackened and caramelized on the outside and covered with dark sauce. Or super-rich liver sausages. Or chai tau kueh (Ha! Finally something wikipedia hasn't heard of!), wok-fried radish cubes covered in chilli and oil.

But, as well as the old food, there's new food too. This time around was my first encounter with Beard Papa, a Japanese chain store selling giant cream puffs of choux pastry. Their logo is a fat old man with a white beard, looking suspiciously like Santa Claus. I saw it from a distance while waiting for some friends in a shopping mall.

Hsiu Lin tried it and pronounced it "not my favourite food". I thought it was quite good, nicer, at least, than the Puffy cream puff shop in Sydney is apparently a copy of the craze-starting original. Besides, whether it was good or not was hardly the point. If you see something called "Beard Papa", how can you not try it?

Comments

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Might check later studies re coconut milk. I think they found the more common kind has the good kind of fat -- anyway it's now on the good list, I think.