80 Main Rd, Moonah

Opening hours: Monday-Sunday 11.30am-9pm

ON THE MENU

Duck pancakes, $8.90; steamed barbecue pork buns, $6.80; soup dumplings, $6.80; pan-fried dumplings, $12.90; char kway teow, $15.90; beef noodle soup, $15.80.

There is a legendary hawker in Penang’s Lorong Selamat who makes the island’s best char kway teow. Madam Soon Suan Choo is known as much for her iconic rendition of the charred rice noodles, Chinese sausage, prawns, spring onions and chilli as she is for her abrupt manner and strict ordering protocol. All orders must be placed in Hokkien, must include a table number and you must be prepared to wait (usually about 45 minutes, she is not to be rushed). Thankfully, getting our mitts on a piping hot bowl or two of Malaysia’s favourite street food at Moonah’s new Pot Sticker Dumpling House is as easy as using the on-table app and waiting not more than 10 minutes for the first of the stream of many dishes to arrive at our table.

And the char kway teow ($15.90) doesn’t disappoint – fresh rice noodles tossed in a searing hot wok and flavoured with salty soy and sweet kecap manis.

Sure, they weren’t cooked over charcoal in a humid laneway in Malaysia, but I’ll take them any day of the week and a second serving was ordered immediately.

The menu here is impressively large and thankfully I had two hungry teenagers on hand to help me get through as many dishes as possible – I had tried the fragrant beef noodle soup ($15.80) on a separate, solo visit and deemed it too difficult to share, but other than that it was game on.

Fluffy steamed barbecue pork buns ($6.80) had a slightly sweet dough and a rich porky filling – our table was split when it came to eating the (edible) paper on their base. Praise was universal for the duck pancakes ($8.90) – the duck was warm and the pancakes fresh and not overly chewy. They came pre-rolled with spring onion and cucumber, so all we had to do was dip, eat, repeat.

The last of our smaller dishes was a serve of spring onion pancakes ($5.90) – soft, onion-laced dough that’s been rolled, spiralled and rolled again before being fried to shattering crispiness.

It’s no secret that dumplings are a big part of the offering here (the clue’s in the name) and we enjoyed a combination of both steamed and fried. Soup dumplings, xiao long bao ($6.80) are a trap for young players – these cute-as-a-button twisted steamed dumplings are filled with hot soup as well as pork filling and are best punctured, slurped and eaten with caution. What kind of culinary magic gets the liquid into the dumplings? The soup is a collagen-rich broth that solidifies when refrigerated, once it’s inside the dumpling and steamed, it reverts to its liquid soup form.

Pan-fried dumplings full of chicken/prawn and pork ($12.60) were also a crowd favourite with their crisp, lacy edges and tender filling.

In addition to the numerous dumplings on offer, there are some larger main-style dishes.

One of my favourites was the green beans with minced pork ($17.90) – the crisp-tender fried beans are the star of this dish, with just enough pork and chilli to give them a punch of flavour.

Brown braised chicken ($15.90) has a sweet/sour sauce that has warmth from dried chillies rather than mouth-searing heat.

Pot Sticker’s fit-out includes a cute nod to their stock-in-trade with light fittings made from bamboo steamers and as dishes are brought to the table, there’s a help yourself cutlery and soy sauce station.

Trade is brisk on a Tuesday night, with a constant stream of eat-in diners as well as food delivery drivers and people collecting takeaway orders. The only downside of this traffic is a broken front door that refuses to close, meaning that one of the dine-in customers gets up to shut it approximately every three minutes. Hopefully it’s an easy fix that can be rectified before our next visit – which would have been the following night if my husband had had his way.

While most of the menu items are Cantonese, there are a few excursions into other Asian cuisines including Malaysian laksa and char kway teow as well as Indonesian nasi goreng. Every dish we try is rated highly by my teen tasting panel who move swiftly from post-soccer hunger to post-dumpling torpor and declare the evening a big success.