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