Bright lights but tasty food at R&S Satay Noodle House

Over the past cou­ple of months I have been review­ing Malaysian restau­rants all around Welling­ton for Malaysia Kitchen (full dis­clo­sure – I got refund­ed some of the costs). It’s time to share the reviews!

I have gone past R&S Satay Noo­dle House thou­sands of times in my life as it’s in a prime posi­tion but I’d nev­er been inside. Thank­ful­ly though, the Malaysia Kitchen pro­gramme com­pelled me to review it, and helped me push past my fear of bright­ly lit and alco­hol-free places!

The menu took my friend and I ages to peruse, spread over two walls, some dish­es pho­tographed, and some chalked up on a black­board. As the name might sug­gest, noo­dles fea­tured heav­i­ly on the menu, as well as a range of rice dish­es and Malaysian cur­ries like ren­dang. With so much to choose from, we decid­ed we’d need to try a bunch of things in order to get the full expe­ri­ence, then realised we were going to be order­ing around six dish­es. Since there were two of us, we cut that back to a much more rea­son­able three and a half — but we’ll be back!

First to emerge from the kitchen was the bar­be­qued pork Mee Hoon (which we’d ordered with­out shrimps). As we tossed the noo­dles with some of the pro­vid­ed chili sauce, we noticed a smokey flavour emerg­ing from the bot­tom of the plate. That played nice­ly off the fresh spring onions and bean sprouts, and the plate was emp­ty pret­ty quick­ly.

Next up was chick­en stir-fried with gin­ger and spring onion. It was okay but my least favourite dish of the night, not real­ly bring­ing the wow fac­tor at all, although the cone of rice was a nice touch.

The side of roti we ordered tast­ed like the roti store-bought roti that almost every oth­er Malaysian restau­rant in Welling­ton serves, but it was pleas­ing­ly not too greasy, and came with a gen­er­ous serv­ing of real­ly nice satay sauce.

Our last dish was the asam lak­sa, which was a big sur­prise: intense­ly fishy but also quite fresh and invig­o­rat­ing thanks to the tamarind, chili, cucum­ber and pineap­ple. This was the last of our dish­es to arrive and it did­n’t real­ly ben­e­fit from hav­ing din­ner com­pan­ions: it’s so flavour­some and fill­ing that it needs to be enjoyed on its own. We end­ed up leav­ing food on the table, but are already mak­ing plans to go back to make our way through more of the noo­dle options.
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