As printed on their box, “a heritage of over 155 years” finds its true meaning, as we discovered that they still adopt an ancient front-end system of sales transactions and customer service, leaving much to be desired other than their acclaimed tau sar pneah which didn’t justify the 1.5 hour wait. Our visit to the original Ghee Hiang branch last Sunday truly makes us appreciate why a similar Taiwanese shop which specializes in pineapple tart can be a listed company while the other 155 year-old shop remains, well, just a local biscuit shop – for starters, one meant business while the other meant business-only-when-we-feel-like-it. Honestly, it’s a difference between heaven and earth. Anyway here’s what went down that day:

Our original plan was to purchase our tau sarpneah from Ghee Hiang’s “sister” company, Him Heang because as rumor has it, the latter (this is a word-for-word translation) “taste SLIGHTLY better” than the former. Hence we actually weren’t too disappointed when we found out that Him Heang is closed every Sunday (this shop justify another post on its own) as there’s always Ghee Hiang’s version that we think has a similar (a very fair description?) taste. Upon arrival of the shop at Macalister street, there was already a reasonable queue with probably less than 10 orders before uswhich we thought is okay since we thought it’d probably take like 30 minutes max IF (a big IF) run efficiently. Well, we ended up spending 1.5 hours waiting while analyzing everything that’s wrong about the management…First of all, there is only ONE opened sales counter on a SUNDAY. Behind the counter, there were only 3 staffsout of which 2 are teenagers – 1 at the back folding boxes (and folding boxes only) while the other is in-charge of packing(really slowly) and 1 uncle who does pretty much everything else (e.g. taking order, collecting cash, issue receipt, reservations, collections, answering queue-cutting aunty questions, taking queue-cutting aunty orders etc..). HELLO? 3 staffs on a busy Sunday?

Secondly, due to the fact that there is only one open counter, it only takes ONE indecisive aunty to waste half an hour of everyone’s time. She just could NOT decide if she prefers the green tea moon cake or the other type for the longest time! Goodness. She eventually called her husband (I think) into the shop, explained the situation which leads to her husband (I think) telling her “up to you” only then she finally decided to go with something.

Thirdly, have I mentioned queue-cutting lady? You get the annoyance. Nothing is worse than queue-cutters. The whole process is just so poorly managed and system is so flawed in so many ways. It will only work in one situation – everyone knows what they want before their turn, then order, pay and finally packthe food themselves – we were out of the shop in 2 minutes from the start of our turn! The front-end service is in a dire need of a huge revamp if they want to make it through their 156th anniversary… Let's talk about the tao sar pheah. The tao sar pheah was packed nicely in a tube of 4 pieces. Once I opened the packaging, the aromatic smell of the tao sar pheah spread through my nose. The pastry was slight crispy and bland, but when it was topped with butter, it was slightly sweet. The inner fillings were filled with tao sar pheah with some tinch of fried onions (very tiny pieces) that brought out the flavour. The texture was soft and powdery. The fillings were moist. It was very savoury and slightly salty when eaten.

Despite the tasty tao sar pheah, the glitches overwrote the tastiness of it. The Penang famous Ghee Hiang tau sarpheah, can be summarized as: 1 out of 10 stars (1 star for being famous enough for us to try it once) or 8 out of 10 stars if only the waiting time is less than 30 minutes.