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?

The Australiafiles: Part 3- Bubble Tea and Cendol

This section is to do with two drinks commonly found in Asia. I'll start with bubble tea.

I've mentioned bubble tea before in a previous post, and that my favourite flavour is taro milk tea (taro's a type of yam that happens to be purple). To recap: bubble tea is traditionally a sweet milky tea with sweet and chewy tapioca balls which looks like bubbles in the drink, but has evolved into any sort of drink with tapioca 'bubbles' in, from fruit juice to milkshakes. You can even get different toppings in addition to tapioca like nata de coco (sweet fermented coconut gel- it's a lot tastier than it sounds) and fruit salad.

Bubble tea is finally enjoying a developing craze here in the UK (late, as usual with a lot of food crazes like sushi, the cupcake and the whoopie pie), but it's old hat in Asia, including in Australia. I found that the two most popular and common bubble tea stalls were Easyway Tea and Chatime (the latter of which has just started up in the UK, yay!)

The first place I tried was Easyway Tea, and of course I had to see what my favourite flavour was like over there.

I chose a taro frappé with the traditional tapioca bubbles

 It was an awesome bubble tea- my issue with a lot of places that do bubble tea in the UK is that they water down the flavour a lot, almost as if they're scared people won't like it (particularly with taro flavour). Thankfully they didn't skimp on the flavour for this one. I liked the texture of the frappé for a change too (an ice-blended drink, sort of like a Starbucks frappuccino).

A few days later I came across a Chatime when I was doing touristy things around Sydney harbour. Perfect timing for an icy drink- it was about 40 degrees out. This time, however, I chose something other than taro. (Gasp!)

Mango milk smoothie with tapioca and nata de coco

Chatime had a little less choice in drinks than Easyway Tea, but only by a little bit (the only thing they didn't offer were frappés, but they had the normal iced-style drinks, smoothies, fruit juices, coffees and milkshakes- and also a huge range of toppings). They were also pretty generous with their toppings and this drink actually served well as lunch by itself! I hope that the UK incarnations of Chatime are as good with choice of flavours and generous toppings.

Now. What is cendol?

This is cendol:

Okay, I'll admit it looks a bit weird. However, the ingredients make it a gorgeous drink-dessert hybrid. The basic makeup of cendol is coconut milk, palm sugar syrup, plenty of shaved ice, and, of course, the cendol itself.

Cendol are the pasta-like green noodles flavoured with pandan, a green and sweetly aromatic plant

I freaking love cendol, and find it hard to come by in the UK- especially since the place I always used to buy it closed down years ago. When I saw it being sold in the food court in Singapore Changi airport during the stopover on the way home, I had to buy it. It might be a strange-looking thing, brown from the palm sugar with green worm-like rice noodles, but of course it was the weirdness that appealed to me in the first place.

Other things are often added to cendol to turn it into a more substantial dessert: sure enough, the one in Sydney Changi came with red beans (one day I'll do an entry on red bean ice drink and ice kacang- other desserts involving beans) and sweet palm seeds. Yes, it seems unusual to a lot of Western tastebuds, but I promise you it works, and it's delicious. I warn you though, it's pretty filling!