Squid, other dishes satisfy sweet & spicy cravings
Mark Laba
Province
Chef Jamal Abu Bakar serves up a feast at his Malaysian eatery. Photograph by : Gerry Kahrmann, The Province
Seri Malaysia Restaurant
Where: 2327 E. Hastings St., Vancouver
Payment/reservations: Cash only, 604-677-7555
Drinks: Soft drinks
Hours: Tuesday-Sunday, lunch 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m., dinner 5 p.m.-8 p.m., closed Monday
There are a couple of deal-breakers for me when I’m dining out. One is chicken veins. Can’t stand them, can’t abide them and, if a good thick one comes popping out of an entrée like a snapped elastic band, I’m done. Next is any artery or ventricle or similar muscular channel running through a piece of beef, its opening winking at me like the oozing eye of the devil himself. One of these shows its evil face and I’m back out on the street in seconds. Finally, squid tentacles with the suction cups flared, ready to get a death-grip on my tongue and tear the taste buds right off their papillae. I don’t mind squid rings — it’s their appendages that bother me. So it was just my luck to meet my nemesis at this restaurant.
Hole-in-the-wall doesn’t really describe this place. It’s more, as Peaches said, like the hole-in-the-hole that’s in the hole-in-the-wall even though that doesn’t make much sense. Maybe it’s the bump in the log in the hole at the bottom of the sea or maybe it’s . . . well, you catch my drift.
That pretty much sums up the interior. I mean the only decorative touches are essentially whatever clothing your fellow diners are wearing. The clear plastic covering the tabletops are a metaphor for the utilitarian nature of this venture and bespeak, as I’ve said before, the feeling that the dining adventure is about to get saucy and sloppy.
Peaches and I started off with a very nice and savoury chicken satay ($7.75) with one of the best peanut-sauce dippers I’ve come across. A deep brownish-red hue set the satay stage for an exquisite sweet and spicy concoction saturated with sub-equatorial spices that swept over the palate like a flash tropical storm.
We steadied ourselves in this barren landscape of an eatery for the three dishes that arrived next to make up our main meal. Lamb biryani ($10.50), beef rendang ($7.75) and mee goreng ($7.75), a fried noodle dish with a bewitching soy sheen in which I came face-to-face with the tentacles of doom.
Lamb biryani was tasty but the meat, in true street-hawker fashion, bounced between the bony, the fatty and the decent, but the saffron-scented rice was delicious.
Beef rendang has always been a personal favourite of mine, with its intricate mix of ingredients and balance of sweet, sour, spicy and salty flavours. In a good beef rendang there’s a clarity to the layers of tastes rather than a muddling of ingredients and this version had that sense but somehow missed some of the more pungent and spicier aspects. The beef could have been more tender and the sauce was too oily and not thick enough.
As for the mee goreng, what can I say? Tentacles beckoned to me like the sentries to Davy Jones’ Locker. But I bit the bullet, put my fears aside and found this noodle dish with chicken and shrimp along with the squid to be very satisfying. As long as I hid the tentacles under a napkin I was OK.
There are plenty of other dishes I’d still like to try, such as the roti canai, spicy garlic prawns, green beans in belecan, nasi lemak and char kway teow noodles, but I may do it as takeout and enjoy the food in the more upscale setting of, say, a bus-stop bench, bingo hall or waiting room at the dentist’s office.
THE BOTTOM LINE:
Street-hawker stylings in a Spartan indoor setting.
RATINGS: Food: B- Service: B Atmosphere: C-
© The Vancouver Province 2008