Mee-Search
Where Penang's noodles come from
Every noodle dish in Penang arrived from somewhere, carried by someone, and changed on the way. This is the graph underneath the diary — four ways in.
Every connection traced to a source, and the shaky ones say so.
Origin drill
“Chinese” covers a dozen different kitchens, and “Indian” covers several more. Drill through the rings and each one gets more specific — from a broad thread, to the community that carried it, to the town the recipe left: Zhangzhou, Dabu, Nagore.
Start drilling Start hereBowl orbit
One bowl, taken apart. The noodle, every ingredient, every technique — each coloured by the community that contributed it. Most bowls turn out to hold five or six kitchens at once.
Open a bowl AlphaThread flow
Pick a kitchen or a noodle and follow it across the island. Some stayed put; yellow alkaline noodles ended up in nearly every stall, regardless of whose stall it was.
Follow a threadArrivals
When the kitchens got here — Hokkien, Hakka, Cantonese, Tamil Muslim, and the rest — mapped onto ports, migrations and ordinances.
Not open yetDrawn from census records, food writing, academic work on the Straits Chinese and the Hadhrami diaspora, and stallholders' own accounts. Where the record runs out, it says so: every dish carries a confidence level, and contested claims name what is disputed and by whom. Origin drill and Thread flow are early alphas — Bowl Orbit is the place to start.