Loong Fong Cafe

Yuan Yang, kopitiam style

The drink to order at Loong Fong Cafe 龍鳳茶室 is the Yuan Yang: coffee and black tea in the same cup, pulled together until they froth, served in the thick ceramic cup and saucer that marks a kopitiam out from a cafe.

That one order places the whole room. This is brewed coffee, tea, toasted bread and conversation, not espresso, pour-over or single origins, and no roasters or processing methods enter into it. The food follows the same tradition: Penang hawker cooking and local breakfast plates, with a wider mix that runs to Muslim zi char, Thai, Vietnamese and western dishes.

Antiques, wooden tables and a room that talks

The room carries much of the appeal. Simple wooden furniture, calligraphy on the walls, old-school posters, antique display cabinets, porcelain figurines and painted teaware fill a shophouse about a century old, and a vintage accessories store on the second floor extends the same atmosphere upstairs.

None of it is hushed. The cafe runs packed, staff move briskly between tables and dishes arrive fast, so the soundtrack is conversation, clinking porcelain and the smell of brewed coffee and toast. It is a heritage breakfast-and-brunch room in old George Town rather than a quiet place to sit with a laptop.

What to order after the Yuan Yang

Toast is the natural companion, with kaya and butter the standard kopitiam pairing and the thing most tables have in front of them. Take it with the Yuan Yang and the visit makes sense in a single order.

From there the menu opens out into Penang traditional cooking, worth exploring if the visit lands at a meal hour rather than a coffee one. The room, the porcelain and the pace are as much the reason to come as anything on the plate.