Chinatown: Rasa Sayang

If you didn't already know, I'm half-Chinese, and my Chinese family lives in Malaysia.

Where?

Chinatown London, 5 Macclesfield Street. Nearest tube station is Leicester Square.

What?

As you can see, it's a Malaysian/ Singaporean restaurant-slash-café. Malaysian eateries are harder to find in London than Chinese, Thai and Japanese places for instance- quite sad for me, since one of this things I love most about visiting Malaysia- aside from seeing my family of course- is the food.

Enter Rasa Sayang. It kills two birds with one stone for me: it offers popular Malay dishes, and scores points on affordability too (a much-prized quality when it comes to eating out in London).

For the main course, I had nasi lemak:

Chicken curry, coconut rice, peanuts, peanut sauce, various veggies and little fried fishies.

This was delicious. It was also really, really spicy. The kind of hot and spicy that makes your nose run and your face steadily go red. In other words, it was perfect. The chicken curry was just like what I remember from previous visits to Malaysia, and the portion size was quite generous- that potato in the far right doesn't look like much, but in real life it was almost the size of my fist (I have really small hands, in case you think this is a bit far-fetched).

For dessert, I had ice kacang (possibly an obvious choice, given that ice kacang is partially known for its colourfulness):

Ice kacang is ice shaved so fine it's like snow, and it usually has all sorts of flavoured syrups and toppings. Rasa Sayang's ice kacang is flavoured with rose syrup and evaporated milk, and also has a rainbow of toppings (well, not really 'toppings'- more like 'bottomings'): creamed sweetcorn, palm seeds in syrup, grass jelly, red beans and cendol (read more about cendol in my Australiafiles post).

Just to recap briefly, cendol is a bit like pasta, flavoured and made green with pandan leaf extract, and often looking a little bit like green worms. It can also be served as its own dessert with ice, coconut cream and syrup.

Rasa Sayang, along with Longji, is definitely one of my go-to places for a cheapish meal when I'm about in the area. Something I keep meaning to try is a drink called a 'Milo dinosaur', made with the malted chocolate Milo drink- anything associated with dinosaurs has to be good, right?