Injecting new life into an old quarter

ON A Friday night in George Town, Penang, the city tends to hollow out. Queues of cars snake out of the city, bumper to bumper, as city workers head home - hurrying to leave their offices on the last day of the work week.

Jalan Masjid Kapitan Keling is one of four roads that sees a build-up of traffic making a beeline out of the inner city of George Town, but last Friday night, at rush hour, there was a crowd of people spilling out of a coffeeshop at the end of the road, just a stone's throw from the 19th-century mosque built by Indian Muslim traders.

As the crowd gathered around marble- topped tables at Asia Cafe - once the office of F&N in Penang and a coffeeshop since the 1920s - it was clear they were not there just for Penang's famed hawker fare or after-work dri…