Chinatown’s Rasa Sayang

Rasa Sayang has no website and its menu features garish pictures next to each dish. So far, so quaint; so two fingers up to the suave. But the place is actually quite chic – a  sand, cream and blond wood café on the edge of Chinatown. The lighting was bright, unforgiving and all the better to see the food with should the photos not suffice.

I started with crispy roti canai, always a Malaysian favourite of mine. I’ve had better, I’ve had worse. This was fine. My companion loved the starter of curry chee cheong fun though. It was fun, this flame-coloured dish of spongy rice noodle rolls, chopped up in a very tasty curried sauce topped with shavings of crispy green onion.

My main of nasi lemak, a Malaysian staple, seemed a variety of odd bedfellows at first glance: a mound of coconut rice with a big portion of curry chicken – sauce better than meat – roasted peanuts, hard-boiled egg, cucumber slice, honeyed carrot and sambal sauce. It was a patchwork quilt and fine if you want to pick but not if you want to be cosseted. It didn’t quite feel like a dinner that melded together. As a side, our petai (also known as stink beans) stir-fried in spicy sambal sauce was powerful – bitter and fishy – so an acquired taste, to be sure.

Meanwhile, my companion was getting irritated that he couldn’t find the rice listed on the deceptively simple menu. When finally we found it somewhere random, the chicken rice was off. Increasingly fraught, he decided suddenly, `I want something with a head on it.’ So deep-fried fish with sambal sauce it was. Its very real, crispy head peeped out from under a haystack of fresh and flavoursome okra.

We finished on ice cendol, a cold broth of pandan-flavoured coconut milk with palm sugar, crowned with a bushel of red beans. It tasted a bit like a White Russian without the alcohol and was delightful. Rasa Sayang, with its brightness, its fair prices – mains around £7 – and its nursery wipe-down menu, ain’t fancy. But it seems an honest place for a bit of grub, and some of it’s quite good.

Rasa Sayang
5 Macclesfield Street
Chinatown
Soho
W1D 6AY

Tel: 020 7734 1382