$12 for $25 Worth of Malaysian Fare and Drinks at Peninsula Malaysian Cuisine
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- Authentic Malaysian cuisine
- Watch chefs work in the open kitchen
- Contemporary setting
People eat three times a day to prevent mouthy mouths from brashly blurting out their distaste for the rest of the digestive system. Today's Groupon prevents inner-system quarreling by subduing chatty cheeks with Malaysian eats: for $12, you get $25 worth of Malaysian cuisine and drinks at Peninsula Malaysian Cuisine in Whittier.
Peninsula Malaysian Cuisine offers guests a diverse menu of more than 150 delicious specimens of authentic Malaysian fare. Begin with rotai canai, a crispy Indian-style pancake with curry chicken and potato dipping sauce ($3.95), before discovering an El Dorado of spicy golden tofu, featuring homemade bean curd stir-fried with onions and bell peppers ($10.95), or pineapple seafood fried rice in half of a pineapple shell ($10.95). If soup is your style, try the penang udang mee, which drowns yellow noodles with shrimp, pork, and bean sprouts in a sea of tasty shrimp broth ($7.95). Close out your consumption with ice cream and fried bananas ($4.95) or pulut hitam, a dish of creamed black sticky rice drenched with coconut milk ($2.50). Beer and wine are available for decreasing throat desiccation.
Peninsula is founded on the culinary talents of Chef Tong, whose experience in Malaysian munchables ensures the happiness of even the most finicky taste buds. An open kitchen environment allows guests to watch the cooks prepare meals over open flame and iron forge. Register your mouth for a lesson in Southeast Asian cooking and respect the region's etiquette by inviting at least 12 former co-workers you haven’t spoken to in more than a year.
This Groupon is not valid with lunch specials, happy hour, or other offers.
Reviews
Peninsula Malaysian Cuisine has received a lot of press, including an 89.3 Critics' Rating from Mpls.St.Paul magazine, which included reviews from the Star Tribune and Minnesota Monthly. Citysearchers and Yelpers give it a four-star average, and TripAdvisors give it an average of four owl eyes:
- At the end of our dinner, all three of my Malaysian companions gave the Peninsula a strong endorsement: They said the food was as good as at the restaurants back home. – Jeremy Iggers, Star Tribune
- Familiar ingredients (curry, coconut milk) combine with less familiar ones (belecan, tamarind) into a pastiche of flavors that always manages to surprise. – Dennis Cass, Minnesota Monthly
- This is the first place I've been to that actually reminded me of dining experiences in China. – stevekathg, Citysearch
Need to know info
About Peninsula Malaysian Cuisine
Some of the spices and condiments in a Malaysian kitchen—ginger, shallots, chilies—are familiar to American diners. Others aren't as widely known, and it's these that give the seafood, meats, veggies, and curries at Peninsula Malaysian Cuisine their palate-expanding complexity. Belacan, for example, is a dried shrimp paste that provides a salty tang; pandan leaf is an aromatic plant used in desserts as a dumpling wrapper; and galangal is a type of Southeast Asian rhizome that goes well with lemongrass.
At Peninsula Malaysian Cuisine, Chef Tong mixes these ingredients with practiced precision to make nearly 200 dishes, from pineapple seafood fried rice to the Buddhist yam pot—a bowl formed from crispy fried taro and filled with shrimp, chicken, cashews, and vegetables. The restaurant's open kitchen lets guests watch him and the other cooks as they flip the crispy pancakes known as roti canai and toss fresh egg noodles with duck and barbecued pork. The food impressed Jeremy Iggers of the StarTribune along with his Malaysia-born dining companions, who "gave the Peninsula a strong endorsement: they said the food was as good as at the restaurants back home."
The kitchen also displays Peninsula's love for coconut. Jumbo shrimp and beef take on sweetness as they simmer in coconut milk, and a coconut-butter breading turns bites of chicken into crispy treats. To increase the chances that their dreams will take them to a tropical island, diners can finish with another celebration of the fruit of the palm: coconut pudding served inside a real coconut shell.