Typical Asian service then

Rasa Sayang was reviewed by Matthew Norman in the Guardian last Saturday, and Carl and I found ourselves there completely coincidentially on that Saturday - I even had a copy of the Guardian with me, I just hadn't read it yet. It is the new Malaysian/Singaporean place in Chinatown, right opposite my favourite cake shop, Golden Gate 金門餅家 on Macclesfield Street.

Matthew Norman absolutely hated the place, giving it a grand 3/10. His main complaint was the service - very slow and erratic at taking your orders, and also the food coming in dribs and drabs as they are ready. The former I can sympathise with, these places are so much better at serving you when you speak Chinese and can yell at them, but I feel the latter is quite unfair. Most Asian places will serve you the food as they are ready, mainly because there is probably only 1 or 2 woks at the back in which everything is cooked. Don't go somewhere with dishes all under a tenner and expect immaculate service, especially in Chinatown.


But his other big criticism about the food I completely agree with. We had previously stuffed our faces with char siu buns and cake from the cake shop only an hour or so before, so we only sampled their Hainan chicken rice and their curry laksa. The chicken rice was so ugly and haphazard it looked like it was compiled from 5 different chickens, but the laksa looked nice enough:

Carl complained that the chicken rice had too many bones in - not really a valid complaint, but the waitress was being a bit rubbish. She didn't ask whether he wanted bones in, or whether he wanted breast or leg meat, which she did in the next table where the customer was Chinese, ordering in Chinese.

The laksa was pretty terrible too. First of all, very spicy, and I can take my chillis, so much so you can't really taste anything else. There were some limp looking, unidentifiable green-looking vegetables, maybe one prawn, and one bit of squid. It also came more or less as soon as I ordered it, which was all a bit too quick.

However, I cannot say I'm that much of a connoisseur when it comes to Malay/Singaporean food - I had a chance to go through Singapore last year and didn't quite make it. I really should go though, because I can't really get that excited about it, and should learn what I should be eating rather than a laksa. Having said that, I do get very excited about No. 17 from C&R Cafe (also in Chinatown off Wardour Street) - it's like this seafood noodle stirfry, but they use both thick egg noodles and thin vermicelli, complimented with a bucketload of MSG. I shall stick with that next time.