Back when I worked in restaurants and was confident in my ability to run a busy room, I had an unusual dining experience.
I was having Sunday brunch with a colleague at a bustling Kitsilano hotspot. The room had grown progressively busier as our meal went on and we noticed that our server was alone on the floor, juggling all aspects of front-of-house service. One of her co-workers must have called in sick.
We slowly realized that her seemingly easy smile was pure affect; she was getting demolished out there all by herself. Distressed by her situation, my colleague and I stood up, intercepting our server on her way to the kitchen.
“How do the table numbers work here?” I asked her. Without missing a beat, she pointed to table number 1, showed us how they were counted from there, and fetched us each an apron.
We slipped into makeshift support mode, seating guests, running food, topping up coffees, and re-setting tables. Within half an hour, the service crunch had subsided and we were on our way.
I was reminded of that event on a recent visit to Tamarind Hill, a popular Malaysian restaurant in Central Lonsdale.
My dining partner, Mike, and I were seated at the last remaining table in the restaurant at around 8 p.m. The room was teeming with guests at various stages of their meals and plates were flying out of the kitchen pass.
A young woman, calm and collected, deftly managed the front-of-house dinner rush all by herself. Unlike at my brunch experience, however, she coped with the volume brilliantly, replenishing water, delivering bills, taking meal orders, even stopping in to quality-check tables, all in a practiced and efficient style that never betrayed the trying volume of patrons.
The highly skilled service at Tamarind Hill, requiring precision and foresight, is a good metaphor for Malaysian cuisine itself, in which numerous, vastly different ingredients and flavours must find a harmonious balance to create a viable dish; if any element is off kilter, it can compromise the success of the whole.
The flavours at Tamarind Hill are bold; notes of ginger, coriander and lemongrass enliven tart bursts of lime, tamarind and vinegar, while soy sauce, palm sugar and creamy coconut milk temper the heat of chilies. Malaysian cuisine is a complex and artful interplay of unique elements that may seem incongruous when listed on paper, but come to life in a magical way on the palate.
Mike and I selected an ambitious assortment of dishes from the large menu. First up was lamb Murtabak with Gado Gado: two densely packed rolls of roti canai (pliable, skillet-fried flatbread) stuffed with marinated, lean strips of lamb and crunchy vegetables, with a coconut-based curry dipping sauce.
For an appetizer, the rolls were enormous and immensely satisfying, a great value plate at just $9.85.
The accompanying salad, Gado Gado, is an ingenious blend of roasted potato, cucumber, green beans, bean sprouts and tofu, all topped with a rich and spicy peanut sauce.
Next up was Malaysian-style calamari.
At first glance, the calamari looked like any other: thin rings of breaded, deep-fried squid served in a pile with a dipping sauce. That sauce, however, crimson in colour and featuring tangy notes of tamarind and spicy chili, was a profound point of difference and made the dish remarkable. Be sure to thoroughly soak each ring of squid to get the full impact of this deceptively tasty creation.
The star of the meal was seafood Assam curry, an assortment of white fish, prawns, mussels and cuttlefish in a thick, deep orange curry sauce that hit the full spectrum of taste categories from sour to umami.
Assam is the Malay term for tamarind, and the tart, aromatic fruit found a wonderful expression in the curry, balancing the richness of coconut milk and pungency of shrimp paste.
Purple eggplant, tomato, green beans and tofu rounded out the mix and made the curry an outstanding feat of flavour fusion.
We also sampled a dish of Singapore-style Laksa, one of the more renowned culinary contributions of the region.
This dish was a soup-like blend of thin rice noodles, onions, tofu, shrimp, egg, bean sprouts and caramelized shallots in a pale, sweet-and-sour coconut milk-based broth. Despite its formidable size and lengthy list of ingredients, the Laksa seemed light, almost refreshing, perhaps owing to the discernible citrusy acidity of the broth.
A final shared plate of Mee Goring was a generously portioned dish of noodles with beef, shrimp, eggs, vegetables and tomatoes.
The noodles had a mildly smoky flavour from being fried at high heat, and the dish served as a nice means of absorbing the sauces from the other plates. Our meal of two appetizers, three entrees and two local beers came to $89 before gratuity.
Tamarind Hill is located at 1440 Lonsdale Ave. tamarindhill.ca
Chris Dagenais served as a manager for several restaurants downtown and on the North Shore. A self-described wine fanatic, he earned his sommelier diploma in 2001. Contact: [email protected].
