One occasionally finds oneself in Scarberia, in my case early on a Saturday evening having just departed from the Toronto Zoo, and now searching for a Vietnamese supermarket, and dinner. As we drove westward, the Bengali stores and silk emporia quickly gave way to Chinese restaurants around Neilson, and soon we saw a large sign for Farm Fresh Market, written half in Chinese. A sharp right off Sheppard landed us in the parking lot of…Gourmet Malaysia?
Farm Fresh was around the corner in a huge space at the back of a strip mall, so we parked, and decided to deal with dinner first. There was an Asian Legend location right next door, but as my husband and I hosted our wedding dinner at the Chinatown location of AL and sampled approximately 70% of the menu on a long series of reconnaissance missions, we decided to try something different and give Gourmet Malaysia a shot. After all, with a special board like this:
featuring chicken cartilage, you know it’s gotta be good.
It’s a good sized place, occupying two generous retail bays in a suburban strip mall:
And it was packed with Malays out for a good time on a Saturday night. There was a small handful of non-Malays, but all except ourselves were in the obvious company of Malay girlfriends, boyfriends, or in-laws. We were quickly shown to a table, in the banquet hall side of the establishment:
Gourmet Malaysia clearly has more than half an eye on the large party market, with all A/V requirements taken care of:
And a private party room available for those who would rather not invite half the restaurant to their wedding:
All kinds of shenanigans appear to go on at Gourmet Malaysia, judging by the pictures taped up on the walls next to the kitchen doors and the props:
All in all, Gourmet Malaysia is very lively, very purple, and seemed like the place to be. Need some groceries on the way out?
They’ve got that covered, too. We studied the large menu, which proudly proclaimed its specialty dishes, flowing from Malaysian, Singaporean and Indonesian cuisine. I hadn’t had an opportunity to do a lot of research, so we ordered a few things that sounded vaguely familiar (and turned out to be Indonesian, without exception, although widely prepared in all three countries). We ordered gado gago nonya mixed salad in peanut sauce, beef rendang, and mee goreng with seafood. And a bowl of steamed rice for our five year old.
My husband escorted our very squirmy picky-pants five year old across Sheppard for a quick piece of pizza from Pizza Nova, because she eats exactly three things from the entire Asian world: dumplings, steamed rice and severely limited types of maki sushi. Options (1) and (3) were not on offer, but they hadn’t been gone more than a few minutes before I was surprised by a plate of gado gado:
Extremely surprised, because I’ve never been to Indonesia, have never actually eaten gado gado, and really couldn’t remember what it was supposed to be like. Turns out, it’s a deep fried salad and strangely, it really hit the spot. Lovely, light mixed vegetable tempura fritters, with plump wedges of fried soft house-made tofu, vivid green beans, a sliced hard boiled egg, some cucumber and tomato sliced, and the occasional chunk of cooked potato, all laid over a bed of crunchy bean sprouts and razor-thin cabbage slices, lavished with rich peanut sauce and garnished with more crushed peanuts. The sweet, spicy, thick peanut sauce soaked into the tempura batter, and all was well. Whenever anything got too heavy, there was always the refuge of the bean sprouts underneath.
Soon afterward came the Beef Rendang, and fortunately my husband and child as well or they would have missed everything.
This is not a fiery dish at all: it’s slow cooked smallish chunks of beef in a very mild curry sauce heavily premised on coconut. The sauce is not plentiful: the pieces are not dry, but the rather grainy sauce sticks to the pieces, and the garnish is a simple strand of fresh coriander. What’s interesting about this is the texture….melting, delicious…and the flavour, which pushes coconut to the very forefront. Coconut is of course a ubiquitous ingredient in a wide range of Asian cuisines, but usually it’s a vehicle for something else: it adds smoothness, it damps down chili a little. But rarely is a curry all about the coconut and this version of Beef Rendang most definitely was.
The Mee Goreng With Seafood did not appear so seafood-ridden at first blush:
But we poked around and found rings of squid, slabs of fish cake, small pieces of fish, the occasional prawn. This is a very straightforward dish, thick-ish yellow noodles, not overcooked so still endowed with a tender resistance, cooked with fish, green onion, a good dash of curry and plenty of chili oil. It’s spicy stuff, good basic street food that will definitely kick your day and probably your GI tract into high gear early in the morning.
The Mee Goreng was respectably spicy and while flagging down our waitress to follow up on the MIA steamed rice, I ordered a cold white coffee:
It wasn’t terribly sweet, but it was very nice and strong….the taste of espresso a clear and present danger in the composition.
All around us in the tightly packed room, we saw seductive-looking dishes being brought out: puffy roti bread with curried chicken and beef, a spectacular lobster dish glazed with a substantial red sauce, platters of unusual vegetables, satay. If I lived anywhere close to this place, I would be back very soon to experiment more with the true Malaysian dishes. However, coupled with the excellent Farm Fresh supermarket around the back (which turned out to be unexpectedly large, well organized, clean and comprehensive with great pricing….a clear competitor for T&T by the looks of things) I can see this becoming part of the Zoo ritual in years to come.
Gourmet Malaysia, 4466 Sheppard Avenue East, Unit 101 http://www.ggmsc.com
$40.00 for two, including tax, tip, iced coffee and unusually good quality jasmine tea.
The World At Our Table 