I have a friend, a former workmate who makes it his business to visit every Asian restaurant in Melbourne, who is forever lamenting what he perceives to be the city’s paucity of good Thai restaurants. Melbourne’s Thai food, my friend assures me, tends to err on the side of sweetness, toning down its often fiery personality to please what he derides as western tastes. Whether it’s a humble no-name Thai joint in the suburbs or a classy brand-name restaurant in the city, Kevin can’t help but find them lacking when it comes to the secret to good South-East Asian cooking—that certain indefinable something he mysteriously refers to as ‘kick’.
Well, Kevin, prepare to have your teeth kicked in.
After a long day in the city, where bloodthirsty throngs of itinerant shoppers shamelessly coathanger one another in pursuit of a bargain at the half-yearly sales, my partner and I find ourselves wandering up and down the city’s laneways in search of its newest South-East Asian eatery, Laksa Me. The restaurant brings together dishes from several South-East Asian countries, most notably Malaysia and Thailand, and, from what I’ve heard, it’s got ‘kick’ in spades.
We are pleased to be getting in out of the cold, except, as we soon discover, it’s pretty cold inside as well. A small electric heater in the corner struggles to warm even a fraction of the restaurant. The concrete floors have been hastily splattered with Chinese characters and the occasional smudged handprint; pipes and light fittings are all unashamedly visible to the diner; and the plants in the window, as far as I can tell, are all made out of plastic. The obligatory beckoning cat sculpture, waving at us from behind the counter, smiles knowingly.
The evening begins with three impressive appetisers (some of which are more impressive than others). Two slivers of beef, lightly seared in a peppercorn-infused olive oil, arrive on a bed of shredded lettuce, wrapped in dark-coloured betel leaves and dressed with a drizzle of roasted coconut vinaigrette. A large sprig of fresh coriander—which we are soon to learn is the restaurant’s garnish of choice—adds to the already aromatic mix. More impressive are two tofu-skinned parcels of bean thread noodles, Chinese mushroom, grated carrot and ginkgo nut, all deep-fried and served on a mattress of blanched and pickled cabbage. The resultant meeting of sweet and sour is to become a reoccurring theme of the evening; the sucker-punch combination of garlic and chilli, which hits us for the first time with our first bite of Thai sausage, is to be the other. Heady and fragrant, if admittedly a little fiddly, two grey-ish cocoons of rice, minced pork, chilli and garlic, grilled in a cornhusk and garnished with diced cucumber and crushed peanuts, are pungent little flavour bombs just waiting to go off.
I am surprised when our main of pla sam rod, or ‘three-flavoured fish’, arrives before our laksas do; it seems that liberty has been taken with the order of our orders. We choose not to comment on this oversight, but rather turn our attention to the fish—three white-fleshed fillets, lightly battered and fried, swimming before us in a chutney-like sauce of tamarind and chilli. The three flavours—sweet, sour and chilli (spicy, according to the menu)—are there as promised and are all in fighting form; however, the dish—a Thai favourite—is nothing particularly mind-blowing and, all things considered, probably doesn’t warrant its price tag in twenties. It comes with a bowl of well-steamed rice.
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Of the several noodle dishes on the menu, three of them are laksas (there’s also a pad Thai and some dry noodle dishes). My partner and I choose a different one each: the laksa lemak for me and the curiously named My Mum’s Laksa for her. The laksa lemak is a wonderfully chaotic concoction of fish cakes, fish dumplings (or fish balls), fried tofu, hardboiled egg, prawn meat and shredded cucumber. This is served atop a tangle of rice vermicelli and a well-hidden thicket of crunchy bean shoots. All of it swims around in a broth of creamy laksa stock, which, spiked as it is with a knob of potent curry paste (which gradually dissolves into the broth as you slurp your way through it), renders me red as a beet in the face and has me ordering my second beer. Two whole mint leaves and a handful of chopped spring onion serve as garnish whilst adding some much-needed colour.
My Mum’s Laksa differentiates itself from the lemak only very slightly: instead of bits and pieces of seafood, the broth contains pork, shredded chicken and prawn, and uses hor fun, or pho noodles, which are thicker and more like fettuccine than rice vermicelli. Its heady curry flavours are also more pronounced than those of than the slightly creamier lemak. For all intents and purposes, however—and despite what I have read around the traps—it seems to me that the same coconut milk-based broth is used in both (and probably all three) laksas.
I can’t imagine that many people will be having dessert at Laksa Me, but perhaps they should try and leave room for some, because at least two of the options are truly excellent. My austere-looking serve of rice dumplings both surprises and impresses me. They are served in a steaming sweet ginger broth which, the faintest shade of amber in colour, is warm and refreshing. The dumplings—four globular little ping-pong balls filled with dark maroon red bean paste—transform in the mouth into malleable blobs of wonderfully gelatinous sweetness. Meanwhile, my partner’s sticky black rice pudding arrives in a coconut milk broth with a garnish of fresh papaya. There’s a fugitive piece of papaya in my broth too, and while it probably shouldn’t be there, I’m willing to overlook its incursion on the grounds that I’m too satisfied to care. (When I return to the restaurant two days later, my companion orders the Thai pumpkin custard. A whole, albeit small, pumpkin arrives filled with warm coconut custard. Sweet, savoury, subtle and compelling, this intriguingly exotic dessert is, perhaps surprisingly, not at all cloying; rather, as a dish for the middle of winter, it’s right on the money. The dessert is based on a recipe in which a large pumpkin is filled with custard, baked, and then cut up and shared between a number of people. This version, obviously, has been scaled down for individual consumption.)
My former workmate has complained to me, at work and via e-mail, about the reviews that Laksa Me has received thus far. The critics haven’t, he complains, represented the restaurant accurately—one review, by a well-known writer, didn’t even mention the laksa (hence the reason we tried two). This misrepresentation, I assure him, is likely to continue: the restaurant critic’s methodology—namely, sampling as much of the menu as possible—is always going to seem inadequate when restaurants don’t lend themselves to that kind of treatment. On the night we ate at Laksa Me, my partner and I spent just under $100; by comparison, when I returned again two nights later with another friend, we spent only $50. Even then, it’s entirely plausible that, forgoing multiple courses and drinks, one could get away at lunchtime having paid little more than $10. And therein lies the rub for the critic: in reviewing Laksa Me, one is forced by the nature of his gig to misrepresent the way that people eat there. For Laksa Me is not the type of restaurant you go for a three-course meal—it’s the type of place you go to for a lunchtime laksa or an afternoon Thai sausage. It’s also, now, the type of place you go if you’re after good South-East Asian food—the type of place my former workmate goes to when he’s gunning for a kick in the teeth.
The Scene, 28 June 2007
