This is a sister of the Chinatown Penang, which was in turn the offspring of a restaurant in New York City. The Chinatown Penang is decorated in neo–Trader Vic, but the Harvard Square space is done in the early-’80s " high-tech " style, with steel flooring, exposed ducts and pipes, Lucite-slab tables, fake-steel girders, real-steel girders, screens made of expanded steel mesh, and so on. I assume that today the coastal Malaysian island of Penang is as industrial as it is colonial. In any case, the Malaysian food is just as good here as it is in Chinatown. I’d probably like Malaysian food in any kind of décor: Bauhaus, Greek Revival, psychedelic — just keep the roti canai coming.

Penang’s culinary heritage is similar to Singapore’s, mixing Malay and Siamese food influences with those of old overseas communities of semi-assimilated Chinese, Indian Muslims, and Tamils. Unlike most melting pots, this one actually generated exciting hybrid foods — dishes with local spices, Chinese finesse, Indian breads, and brilliant use of hot chili peppers. Penang has largely cut the chili peppers from most dishes, but if you ask for Malaysian hot sauce, you will get a little saucer of fiery balachan: red-chili sauce with a hint of shrimp paste and lime juice.

My favorite thing at the Chinatown Penang is roti canai ($3.75), a chewy, thin flatbread you can dip in a hot yellow curry with chicken and potatoes. So at this location, we moved up to roti telur ($6.25), the same dip with a more complicated flatbread stuffed with onions and eggs. I like this one even better, especially as the curry is somewhat drier-flavored and spicier than I recalled. I also recommend the Penang lobak ($7.95), a combination of three fried delights with two sauces and a few quarters of preserved egg. The best of the fried delights is a couple of thin pork rolls wrapped in taro. Buttery shrimp pancakes are quite good, as are impeccably crisp and dry cubes of tofu. The dips are a sweet chili sauce similar to Thai " squid sauce, " and a hoisin sauce. Not everyone likes preserved egg, so the modest portion is fine, while a recent addition of Japanese-style pink pickled ginger is sort of fun with fried food. This is where you could impress your server by asking for a little balachan.

" Satay bean curd " ($5.75) isn’t on a stick, as the name suggests, but actually comes as three triangles, like three quarters of a club sandwich, each hollowed out and stuffed with cucumber shreds and bean sprouts, with a sweet brown peanut sauce. Again, a micro-dab of balachan would be just the thing. Achat ($4.75) is an appetizing pickle of cucumbers, carrot sticks, cabbage, onions, and green beans. The pickle was a little salty, a little sweet, slightly curried, but not as distinctive as achat can be. It is an ideal appetizer, however, taking the place of salad.

With main dishes, we mostly skipped favorites from the old Penang, such as Penang house-special lobster, rendang, coconut jumbo prawns, and Penang seafood-rice noodle. We did get one old friend, the Buddhist yam pot ($12.95). It comes in chicken and seafood versions, but the star is the ring of fried mashed taro, with a sweet, nutty flavor, that loves any kind of contrasting vegetable or sauce. The vegetables our night were shiitake mushrooms, red and green bell peppers, straw mushrooms, button mushrooms, broccoli florets, carrots, onions, and baby corn cobs.

Our new favorite might be " Fried Red Snapper Fish in Thailand Sauce " (seasonal price). The Thailand sauce is a simple, sweet chili sauce with some red bell peppers. The fish was both meaty and delicious inside, and crisp enough outside so we could eat some of the fins and tail. We’ll certainly be interested in the " Dried Curry Style Chilean Sea Bass " when the dish switches to a fish that isn’t so badly over-fished as the endangered Patagonian toothfish. " Hot and Spicy Jumbo Prawns (Chef’s Special) " ($20.95) are indeed quite large shrimp, served up in a frying pan with a hot barbecue sauce any Texan would embrace. This was the only starred menu item actually spicy enough to rate one to two chili silhouettes on the typical Thai-restaurant-menu scale. In search of noodles and vegetables, we asked for a vegetarian version of the chow fun ($7.95). The kitchen obliged with a fine plate of broad, fat noodles in a soy-based gravy, with some broccoli and bean sprouts on top.

Penang has neither beer nor wine, but does offer some interesting fruit drinks. " Watermelon drink " ($2.75) is just watermelon juice on ice, and very good. Lime juice ($2.25) is salty, as though made from preserved limes as well as fresh. It’s different, but also very good with this food.

Penang has added a number of typical Southeast Asian desserts as these have found a broader audience. The glasses of iced syrups with floating jellies and beans I still find odd, although bubble tea is a crossover fad from the same family. But the hot, sweet, soupy desserts are deeply comforting. Bo bo cha cha ($3.75) is a simple hot, sweetened coconut soup with cubes of taro and sweet potato. Coconut pudding ($6.25) is a delicious cold jellied concoction, served inside a coconut — that is, in a one-piece edible coconut lining with the husk cut off all around it. I don’t think I could do that with a band saw, so we will have to wait for a DVD lesson in Malaysian dessert technology. Then we can trade in those blowtorch kits we got to make crème brûlée at home for whatever one needs to carve stuffable coconut meats.

A banana split ($6.25) is two scoops of mango ice cream (yes!) flanking a scoop of green-tea ice cream (a dryish, refreshing flavor), with two whole bananas and some decorations made of the only chocolate to be found on the menu. Each scoop of ice cream sports a triangular cookie emblazoned with the words BUSSY CRACKER, which must be an imported delicacy of great meaning.

Service at Penang was excellent on a crowded Saturday night, making this a good resource when attending theater or events in Harvard Square, or even the later shows at the Regattabar.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com