M. Mohamed Thamby Rawther

Although Mohamed Thamby was not a trained chef, he was smart enough to combine his personal knowledge of spices with local Penang palate preferences.

The spice trader’s paradox #

The founding paradox of Hameediyah Restaurant is that its creator was not a chef. Mohamed Thamby was a spice trader from Tamil Nadu — a man whose expertise lay in sourcing, grading, and blending raw ingredients, not in preparing finished dishes for paying customers. Yet it was precisely this upstream knowledge that gave him an advantage no trained cook could replicate. He understood spices at the molecular level: which Turkish peppers carried the deepest heat, how Pakistani cumin behaved differently from Indian, why certain blends mellowed with time while others sharpened.

What he lacked in kitchen technique he compensated for with a merchant’s intuition for local demand. Penang in 1907 was a polyglot port city where Tamil Muslim dock workers, Malay fishermen, Hokkien traders, and British colonial administrators ate within streets of one another. Mohamed Thamby read this market and calibrated his masala accordingly — not the fiery intensity of his home region’s cuisine, but something broader, rounder, designed to satisfy palates that had never encountered Ramanathapuram spice blends before. The result was a curry base formula so precisely balanced that seven generations of his descendants have declined to alter it.

From Tamil Nadu to Campbell street #

Mohamed Thamby Rawther was born around 1870 in Chittar Kottai, a town in the Ramanathapuram district of Tamil Nadu known for its mercantile families. Early family records also refer to him as “Nalla Kader.” He arrived in Penang around 1890, part of the Tamil Muslim diaspora that was reshaping the island’s commercial and culinary landscape during the late colonial period. For roughly seventeen years, he worked the spice trade — sourcing, transporting, and selling the raw materials that fuelled Penang’s kitchens without ever running one himself.

The transition from trader to restaurateur came in 1907, when Mohamed Thamby began selling rice and curried dishes from a kandar — the wooden shoulder pole from which two baskets of food hung at either end. This was the method that gave nasi kandar its name, and he was among its early practitioners on Campbell Street in George Town. The operation was elemental: hand-pounded spice blends applied to simple proteins, ladled over steamed rice, sold for five cents a plate under a tree. His sons Seeni Packeer, Packeer Mohamed, and Abdul Ghaney worked alongside him as co-founders. The business had no shophouse, no signage, no menu — just a man with an extraordinary masala recipe and a pole strong enough to carry it.

Mohamed Thamby died in 1927, just twenty years after founding the enterprise. He left behind no written recipe, no business manual, no expansion plan. What he left was a formula lodged in the hands and memory of his son Muhammad, who assumed sole leadership and began making what the family’s historical record describes as “a lot of improvements to keep pace with time.”

The recipe that refused to die #

The masala recipe Mohamed Thamby created in 1907 remains, according to family testimony and consistent customer accounts, the unchanged base for every curry dish Hameediyah serves today. “Our customers often tell us that the taste has never changed, from the time they were kids until they had kids,” sixth-generation owner Ahamed Seeni Pakir Abdul Sukkor has said. “Every level of spice and salt is measured properly to ensure consistency.”

This is not sentimental exaggeration dressed as business practice. The restaurant still sources Grade A whole spices from Turkey, Pakistan, India, and Spain — hand-pounded in precise proportions, never commercially pre-packed. When Hameediyah expanded to Kuala Lumpur in 2018 and beyond, the spice mixes continued to be ground at the George Town heritage kitchen and shipped to every branch. The recipe is treated less as a competitive advantage than as an inheritance obligation: something received from the founder that no generation has the authority to amend.

The chain of custody runs through seven handoffs. Muhammad, the founder’s son, ran the business through the late 1920s and 1930s before passing it to his three sons — the generation that endured the Japanese occupation of 1941–1945, when pilots bombed the area around Campbell Street and Japanese soldiers became regular beef curry customers. After the war, a grandson named Abu Baker oversaw the transition from street vendor to permanent shophouse restaurant at 164 Campbell Street. Then came the dynasty’s most unusual succession: Abu Baker passed the business not to a direct son but to a relative, Abdul Sukkoor — a lateral transfer that remains the only documented non-linear handoff in the family’s history.

Abdul Sukkoor’s two sons, Ahamed Seeni Pakir and Syed Ibrahim, now lead as the sixth generation. Ahamed Seeni Pakir described the founder’s genius with the clarity of a man who has spent his career defending it: “Although Mohamed Thamby was not a trained chef, he was smart enough to combine his personal knowledge of spices, acquired after years of observing his family members in the kitchen, with local Penang palate preferences to come up with a widely accepted masala recipe that still serves as a base for all Hameediyah Restaurant curry dishes today.”

Seven heirs, one formula #

What distinguishes the Rawther dynasty from the majority of family enterprises — most of which collapse by the third generation — is not that each heir preserved the recipe. It is that each brought a distinct capability their era demanded, while treating the recipe as the one thing that could not be negotiated.

Mohamed Thamby brought spice knowledge. His son Muhammad brought operational ambition. The third generation brought physical courage — maintaining a restaurant through aerial bombardment and military occupation. Abu Baker brought institutional permanence, transforming a street operation into a sit-down establishment. Abdul Sukkoor, the lateral heir, brought continuity when the direct line could not provide it. The sixth generation brought heritage consciousness, securing the Malaysia Book of Records certification in 2020 and the George Town World Heritage Incorporated Platinum award in 2022 — formal recognition that the founder’s 1907 creation had endured long enough to enter the national record.

The seventh generation brought something none of its predecessors could have imagined needing: crisis-era reinvention at corporate scale. Muhammad Riyaaz Syed Ibrahim, approximately thirty-three years old when the pandemic struck, watched the workforce collapse from fifty to twenty and daily revenue vanish into a RM10,000 government fine. His response — pioneering a parolee hiring programme, driving KL expansion, and opening a six-level Bukit Bintang flagship with fine dining nasi kandar at RM80 per person — represents the boldest reimagining of the founder’s street food vision in the dynasty’s history.

In 2025, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim officiated Hameediyah’s sixth branch. What began as one man’s shoulder pole under a Campbell Street tree now carries the weight of national endorsement. The masala recipe, ground by hand from the same sourcing regions Mohamed Thamby knew as a trader in the 1890s, remains the common thread through every reinvention — proof that a spice merchant who could not cook created something more durable than the skill of cooking itself.

Last updated: April 5, 2026