Asia Style, Glasgow - Restaurants in Glasgow | s1play.com

The real deal

Review published on 05/09/2005 © Sunday Herald

I always try to extend my holiday when I get back home by trying to recreate some of the food I tasted.

Currently I’m going through a Malaysian phase and I was itching to try a dish I tasted there called sago gula melaka. This is a cold, ever-so-slightly wobbly dessert made from tapioca pearls, otherwise known as sago, served with a syrup of palm sugar (jaggery) and salted coconut milk.

I knew I would have to drop in at the Chinese supermarket to get the palm sugar, but it never occurred to me it would be a struggle to buy sago.

In my nearest supermarket – admittedly, a badly stocked dump – the manager had never heard of it. It was a disturbing example of how the lexicon of British food has altered for the worst. If I had been asking for cheese strings or turkey twizzlers, he would have had instant recall.

It made me wonder if, in years to come, a request for some basic like semolina, or even flour, would be met with blank looks all round. In the event, the good old Chinese supermarket (well more a mini-market really) came up trumps, sago now being an arcane exotic foodstuff.

In the event, my pud turned out well, but it was not enough to satisfy my urge for Malay cooking, the inferno-like sputtering of a hawker’s wok, the smokiness of impromptu charcoal barbecues; surreal combinations of outlandish ingredients, steaming broths made from obscure animal parts and uncompromising amounts of chilli.

Several people had told me about Asia Style, a Chinese-Malaysian restaurant on St George’s Road in Glasgow. They all had the same story. This was not the usual Sino-Scottish gastronomic compromise. They had eaten things there they had never seen or heard of before. They hadn’t a clue what most of it was, but it was very good.

Asia Style is pretty much like a Chinese restaurant in Malaysia. It looks basic and functional. It is harshly lit. It is extraordinarily busy, not so much with people who come to eat a meal out as people who come to eat their tea.

A good 50% of the clientele is of Chinese origin, youthful, not well-off and starving hungry. This is not a restaurant where you toy with dainty plates. Get your head down over a pungent bowl, chopsticks working overtime, and demolish the contents with all the lack of ceremony of a Kuala Lumpur bin man on a lunch break. Starve yourself before you eat here and remember one portion easily serves two or three normal appetites.

The food is astoundingly cheap and authentic. Beef satay more than passed muster, though the meat had been fried rather than barbecued. It came with a potent curried peanut sauce. We ordered the special Malay bread, roti canai, like an Indian roti but containing more internal leaves thanks to the inclusion of layers of fat. Scorched and blistered, deliciously oozing, it’s the sort of food that would have Gillian McKeith going ballistic, but wonderful when dipped in its nutty, coconut-creamy curry sauce.

The soft-shell crab is legendary here, consisting of juicy-centred, crisp-legged crustacean in a dry batter under a sprinkling of hot-woked spring onion, toasted garlic and enough incendiary green chilli to make your nose run.

The Hainan chicken rice wasn’t warm enough and lacked a side bowl of steaming broth. But the stock-cooked rice was spot-on, as were its oily ginger and piquant chilli pickles. The waitresses are keen you eat your greens here. Dear Gillian would be pleased. Not just choi sum or pak choi, but a clutch of antioxidant vitamin-packed, slippy emerald delights done two ways, either with ginger and garlic for the wimps or with the delightfully stinky fermented shrimp and chilli paste known as belacan. This is a sound address for the real Malaysian thing.

© Sunday Herald

Beat this old favourite? Asia said than done

Review published on 17/05/2010 © Sunday Herald

Friday night. Half seven. Glasgow. The city surges to the universal beer buzz as office workers throng bars to slake a week’s thirst by firing pay checks straight down their throats. Is it too late to miss the rush at Asia Style? Yes. The queue is already pushing us back out the door and on to the street while the waft of nam pla, the crackle of wok frying and the sight of big gloopy, soupy bowls of curries is a peculiar form of tastebud-tantalising torture.

We bolt round the corner and into the basement of the Asian Gourmet for the usual game of decipher the menu followed by sweet pumpkin squares in crispy golden egg batter, big whole prawns in the same and a huge platter of fresh green beans draped in oil and fiery chilli. Asia Style can wait.

Monday night, 6pm. Asia Style again. This time the door shuts cleanly behind me and I am seated in minutes and before me is a hot plate of sweet, white soft-shelled crab, all crisp and biscuity-battered and served semi-buried in an explosive mound of red and green chilli, garlic and coriander and delicious but unidentifiable bits of something soft.

The truth? This is the dish. The best in this place and probably in this whole city. Yes, there are other soft-shelled crabs. Not that long ago another Glasgow restaurateur announced he was going to put it on his menu and call it Asia Style’s Soft-Shelled Crab. By the time it appeared, the words Asia and Style had mysteriously disappeared along with any resemblance to crispiness, freshness and flavour.

I could go now having had it. But I’ll stay. It’s hard to resist the belly pork or the duck, hanging on hooks in that booth facing the front door where the chefs fry and flash in a dark and tight little kitchen.

Hard to resist the crispy crackling or the soft dribly fat oozing with flavour. So I’ll have some of that. And the simple but stunning bok choi fried with garlic and ginger. And that dribbly coconutty Malaysian curry with chicken slices and, oh well what the hell, bring some duck in plum sauce too.

Go anywhere, they said. It’s the food issue. Your favourite restaurant. But do you know what? I don’t have a favourite restaurant. Not an overriding, consistent, long-term one. My favourite restaurant is usually determined by a combination of hunger, circumstances and company. Yes, I could have gone to Andrew Fairlie’s at Gleneagles, but you can’t just drop in.

So I’ve ended up coming to the restaurant I have come to most often in the many years I’ve been doing this job; the restaurant I always come to when the wife and weans are away in Italy and like a spinster I only have the cat for company; the restaurant I come to when it’s 2am and I’ve done the beer buzz and had a few sherbets and want to kill that looming hangover.

And yes, it’s odd. Yes, it’s plain. In fact, for a number of worrying weeks Asia Style was closed with the dreaded “for refurbishment” sign pinned to the door. A real refurbishment? Or a closed-in-the-night, never-to-reopen refurbishment? The former thankfully, though casting my eye around the crowded tables this evening “subtle” would be the best word to describe the transformation which seems to consist of a couple of tins of Dulux.

There are now three menus, and not one is helpful. That’s why the table of guys next to me surfing the beer buzz are asking the smart question: “What are the Chinese people there eating?” It’s a mixed bag this evening: a party of executives, two older women with a nephew or son and, as usual, a couple of hand-knitted west-end types earnestly discussing a seafood curry.

Best restaurant in Glasgow then? Probably not, but it is the busiest, the most consistent and the one that guarantees to hit you slap in the face with taste after taste after taste. And cheers to that.