Rumours Glasgow
Psst… don’t tell a soul, but there’s a rather good newish Malaysian restaurant in Glasgow called Rumours. Keep it to yourself, but I’ve heard it’s even better than Kampong Ah Lee in Edinburgh, and at least up there with Glasgow’s star oriental eating spot, Asia Style.
How do I know? Keep this under your hat, but my spies tell me that it’s always full of Malaysians, that they outnumber native Glaswegians, which always bodes well for the food because the clientele knows what the real deal ought to be like.
Would I spread a rumour? Who, me? To be honest, yes, although with Rumours in Glasgow, I’m tempted to keep my information all to myself. It may be on Bath Street, but it doesn’t feel that different from a thousand eateries in Kuala Lumpur.
My eyes were popping when, on a Tuesday lunchtime, the queue to eat here was snaking out the door and down the steps. What a buzz to enter a restaurant when it’s quiet and feel it fill up all around you in 10 minutes as people keep piling in. What a joy to see them eating too.
Malaysians aren’t dilettantes who come to nibble neurotically at a low-cal sandwich and swig a piss-poor cappuccino. No, for them, eating is a serious business that requires concentration. So I sit there and watch slim young Malaysians demolishing towering bowls of noodles and rice and mega glasses of gaudy “bubble tea”, slurping the tapioca jelly balls up through those fat straws, chopsticks working away overtime, and I think to myself, thank heavens for Malaysians.
They seem to be breathing new life into Scotland’s tired, going-through-the-motions Asian dining scene, laying on food that, first and foremost, they like to eat themselves – not toning it down to some globalised compromise. Chinese restaurants in Scotland? I scratch my head and struggle to think of one that really serves properly Chinese food unless, that is, you understand enough Mandarin or Cantonese to read impenetrable menus. Most Thai restaurants are sanitised here, too, like the ones you’d find in a Sheraton Hotel in Bangkok catering for American businessmen.
No, Malaysians don’t seem to get carried away with swanky decor. Rumours is clean and functional, with those characteristic Day-Glo posters with handwritten options, but hardly upmarket. It’s all about the food.
Our lunch was lovely, the sort of food that grows the appetite. Pride of place went to a lovely, big, extremely fresh sea bass, steamed with ginger and doused with a garlic, spring onion and chilli sauce, and fantastic soft-shell crabs. These had been fried in the lightest of batters and tossed after cooking with coarse salt and very finely chopped fresh chilli, their crusty extremities yielding luscious, full-flavoured crustacean goo within.
Rumours does a good roti canai, Malaysia’s Indian-style flatbread, and an impeccable nasi lemak, the country’s national dish. Here was perfectly steamed rice, a mild, fragrant coconut milk chicken curry, a good serving of acar, the fresh sweet/hot vegetable salad, a pungent, oily chilli pickle, a pile of toasted peanuts, boiled egg and those addictive crisp-fried salted anchovies (ikan bilis) that Malaysians use to finish dishes almost as we might use parsley.
Rumours also does a stellar char kway teow, literally stir fried (char) flat, broad rice noodles (kway teow) which are much more interesting than the more ubiquitous egg noodles made with wheat that dominate the Scottish-Asian Dining scene. The Rumours rendition passed the acid test for this dish, that it must have that aromatic, charred, slightly smoky taste that is known as “the breath of the wok”. Essentially the noodles are stir-fried with prawns, bean sprouts, Chinese chives, egg, chilli, slivers of Chinese wax sausage and anything else the cook thinks can add prestige to the general melée.
So you never quite know what each mouthful contains, which makes you want to go on eating it. It looks brown and glossy, thanks to the use of dark, rather than light, soy sauce and abundant chilli paste. The food, indeed the whole set-up at Rumours, is fascinating, with so many unusual dishes to explore propped up by favourites that occidentals will more readily recognise like tom yum soup and rendang curries.
It’s charitably cheap so you can afford to experiment without getting a nasty financial shock at the end.