Malaise

Have you ever eaten stingray? I have.

Before this meal, I didn’t even know stingray was something people ate. But according to my Wikipedia research, it’s actually a relatively popular dish in Malaysia. And Malaysian cuisine was what I was there to celebrate, at the New Malaysian Restaurant, for Malaysian Restaurant Week.

I’ve actually had Malaysian food before, at Nyonya, near where I used to live*, but most of the things there had names like Pad Thai and Singapore Rice Noodles. From what I’ve heard, New Malaysian Restaurant is much more authentic, and also quite good. Now I’m not of the school of thought that just because something is unique, it’s authentic. You can’t just put bizarre shit on a menu and say it’s “authentic.” I guess you’d have to ask someone from a specific area if the food we’re eating at a restaurant halfway across the world approximates the cuisine back home. My point is, I am in no position to say that what I ate is any more authentic than takeout Chinese, but I will certainly say that it was good, and definitely one of the more unique meals I’ve ever had.

To celebrate Malaysian Restaurant Week (only in NYC would you get that fucking specific), a bunch of restaurants were offering a “taste of Malaysia” with a 3-course tasting meal. For appetizers my friend and I split coconut shrimp and a roti dish. The shrimp was phenomenal. I’m a sucker for anything coconut, but they really cooked these shrimp perfectly. And you can’t go wrong with roti (basically a flaky pancake with dipping sauce), so the meal was off to a promising start.

Our waiter was both surprised and impressed to see us order the stingray for one entree, although we hedged our bets by getting a relatively more normal beef brisket curry dish as the other entree. The stingray came out covered in a stinky, spicy sauce. The waiter cautioned that it might be a little sour, but that’s not the impression that I got. The sauce was almost like a heavy tomato sauce that was both spicy and a little sweet. Luckily it was good, because it tended to overwhelm the stingray itself. The stingray to me seemed like a mix between crab, scallops, and fish. It had the stringy consistency of crab, tasted a little like scallops, and was served almost like a filet of fish. The stingray is truly the platypus of the sea.** The meat had cartilage or bone going in streaks down the length of the fish, which made eating it a little bit tricky, but once you pulled the meat out, it was a surprisingly good meal.

Dessert was where things got really weird. My friend and I both ordered ice dishes, which seemed like a safe bet, but Malaysians apparently like throwing a lot of weird shit in their ices. Mine was the more normal of the two, and featured hard ices topped with a butterscotch sauce sitting in a pool of coconut milk and red beans. It was incredibly sweet, but actually pretty good. My friend got Singapore ices, which started off looking really pretty and then degenerated into chaos. It was certainly a colorful dish. In the center were the ices, dyed purple with some sort of fruit sauce and covered with what looked like dark blue translucent fish eyes. Going around the ices were corn, red beans, some sort of bright blue jelly, some clear jelly, and possibly fish guts (that last part I made up). After picking at it for awhile and deciding it was too sweet, my friend was told by the waiter to mix it all up to combine the flavors. Miraculously this worked…if you could get past the fact that it looked like purple vomit, complete with chunks of corn (I couldn’t). Next time I'll just go with the soft serve ice cream.


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*I no longer live on Broome Street, this blog’s namesake and winner of Smelliest Block in NYC. I’m keeping the blog name, because it borders on being clever, and that distinction is about as far as I get when naming things. Despite being in bands for about 10 years now, I have never come up with a good band name. Not once.

**Now THERE’S a good band name!