Gastronomy Blog

Nevermind great group dynamics and spending quality time with friends, the best thing about eating out as a group is getting to try everyone else’s food.

Five of us hit Rasa Sayang on Chinatown’s Macclesfield Street before a showing of Swedish vampire flick Let The Right One In at the Curzon. We wanted somewhere cheap and fast and Rasa Sayang fit the bill. The menu covers Malaysia and Singapore and is divided into two sections: ‘Straits Favourites’ and the ‘Heat Zone’, which I liked because it sounds a lot like something you might find in a basement DVD shop on the other side of Shaftesbury Avenue.

Su-Lin of Tamarind and Thyme had already kindly provided me with a recommendation so I knew what I was going for. My only hope was that no one in my party would order the same as anyone else in the group, thus spoiling my tasting lots of other people’s food fun. In the end only one of us chose something from the Heat Zone. And it had a double chilli icon next to it as well. We were all pretty worried for him.

Eyes smaller than bellies

First up came the two starters (I know, measly between five, but I guess some of us just weren’t that hungry) – crispy chicken wings in a Rasa Sayang marinade and crispy roti canai, a Malaysian flatbread served with curry sauce.

The chicken was fine, four pieces well cooked and presented, pleasantly spiced. The curry sauce with the flatbread, on the other hand – my god. We were dipping and dipping and dipping again, we couldn’t get enough of the stuff, the sauce was delicious! It was sweet, spicy and made a hearty combo with the flatbread. Heat wise bit of deep burn in the back of the throat but that was it, and I’m a chilli lightweight. We were such fools to have ordered so little (one portion is two flatbreads and a little dish of sauce).

Our dishes were cleared quickly by the friendly and relatively efficient staff (‘relatively’ comes from my request for tap water on two occasions, both times unfulfilled, eventually abandoned) and within two minutes our mains arrived.

My Malaysia fried Hokkien Mee (poorly pictured, with apologies – I know I said I was through with phone photos) was a decent-sized plate of thick noodles in a dark soy sauce with seafood. The brown sauce was rich, deep and lingering. The noodles may have been a little dry, but the seafood was tasty and well cooked.

My friends had nasi lemak, fried vermicelli Singapore style, slow-cooked curry fish and beef rending. Nasi lemak – a plate of rice, curry and a few little sides - was probably my favourite of what I tasted. The chicken curry had a similar wow factor to our roti canai sauce and sides including tiny dried fish and dark brown pickle were distinct and interesting flavours, all either sweet or sour, or somewhere in between.

In fact the other curries – the rending and the slow-cooked fish – were also impressive, with so many layers of flavour exploding on the tongue all at once. The fish wasn’t really a two-chilli icon dish in terms of heat, in my opinion. But then I didn’t eat the whole thing.

My sole complaint

Only the Singapore vermicelli failed to impress. If I’d ordered it I’d have been disappointed, not because there was anything wrong with it as a dish, but because everyone else was scoffing such great hard-hitting flavours that it seemed a shame to have ordered something that didn’t pack a punch.

Another thing I liked about Rasa Sayang was the drinks menu. I had my first taste of luo han guo, a super-sweet vine fruit made into a iced-tea-like drink. There were also freshly pressed juices on the menu – including watermelon – as well as beers, wines, coffees and so on. There was even a little dessert menu, perfect for sweet-tooths like me. But this time I declined, there being a raspberry meringue at Konditor & Cook with my name on it.

The meal came to a total of £60.10 for the five of us, and that was for two starters, five mains and a drink or two each. Rasa Sayang may not offer a glamorous backdrop or an amazing atmosphere (‘functional’ would be the best way to describe the décor), but I do find it exciting that there seems to be a growing number of good places to eat in Chinatown with excellent price-quality offerings and even nothing (much) wrong with the service. Logistical nightmares though group outings may be, as long as we don’t all order the same thing the organising is bound to pay off.

Where?
5 Macclesfied Street, London, W1

Tube:
Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square