No matter how colourful, poetic or extensive a menu is, I'm usually the first to zoom in on what I want, and fidget while others um and ahh. Not so at Malaysian restaurants. Their offerings of Indian, Malay and Chinese delicacies usually so tempt and thrill me, I'm at a loss as to what to order.
So it was at Satay Hut, a grotty-looking eatery in a grotty corner of Tsim Sha Tsui. Oblivious to the cigarette smoke, the din and the Siberian blasts from an overactive air-conditioner, I feasted greedily on the descriptions of dishes available while my companion wished he was some place else.
I ordered three dishes that are relatively hard to find in Hong Kong. The rojak ($50), an 'esoteric' salad with prawn-paste dressing, was a hodge-podge of cucumber, water spinach, bean sprouts, deep-fried bean curd, pineapple and peanuts - as tasty as those prepared by hawkers in Malaysia, and true to its meaning of 'mixture'. Spicy, with a slight taste of the sea, it was well appreciated, even though the pounded peanuts were stale and clumpy. Next up was the sambal okra ($55), which came spitting and steaming in a ceramic dish. Despite its blistering appearance, it didn't sting the lips. Neither did it cause beads of sweat to appear on the forehead. And its creaminess was not what I expected. The mildness, however, seemed to go down well with my guest, who speared one 'finger' after another, and scooped up the onion rings dripping in sauce.
Our third dish was the laksa, a must at any Malaysian restaurant. Consisting of rice noodles with shrimps, fish cake and chicken slivers in a coconut curry soup, it was like the sambal okra: disappointingly tame. That said, however, the bowl was slowly drained, the rich broth good enough to consume on its own.
Desserts proved even more tricky to choose, with 11 on the menu. We settled on the bubol cha-cha, which is available hot or cold. Since the air-conditioner was still on gale-force setting, we opted for something warming. Consisting of cubes of yam and sweet potato, which bobbed about in pandan leaf-flavoured coconut milk, it was delicious, despite resembling baby food.
Including Tiger beer (the buy one, get one free deal lasts all day), our bill totalled $213.40. For that kind of money, who cares about the ambience? But next time I'll probably ask the chefs to up the heat and the waiters to down the chill.