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!

Today’s Malaysian quest takes us out of the CBD to New­town, but luck­i­ly park­ing is easy at New­town Mall and we can do the super­mar­ket shop­ping after­wards. Kopi Tiam (195 Rid­di­ford St) is an unas­sum­ing lit­tle place, but the food is sur­pris­ing­ly good.

My friend orders a lak­sa and is over­whelmed by the size of the bowl. It’s loaded with shred­ded chick­en, tofu, egg, fish­balls and crab­stick. I steal a spoon­ful and dis­cov­er the gravy is a good com­bi­na­tion of coconut rich­ness and cur­ry flavour. She gets nowhere near the bot­tom of the bowl before she gives up, which means it’s excel­lent val­ue for $9.50. The two of us prob­a­bly could have shared the bowl for lunch, along with the roti, which in this case is served as a whole square and is noth­ing spe­cial.

But in order to try more things on the menu, I order the beef ren­dang. If we ignore the let­tuce and car­rot gar­nish — which I do — this is actu­al­ly one of the best ren­dan­gs I’ve had in Welling­ton. It’s not as dry as is tra­di­tion­al, but it’s per­fect­ly bal­anced. The meat falls apart at the touch of the fork, and the coconut is promi­nent. The por­tion size is gen­er­ous for $12.50 as well.

We don’t need them at all, but we also order half a dozen won­tons ($8) — for research pur­pos­es, obvi­ous­ly. They’re glo­ri­ous­ly crisp, and the fill­ing has a tex­ture like the pork equiv­a­lent of a fish cake.

As well as serv­ing Malaysian, Kopi Tiam has a whole ‘nother black­board full of deep fried West­ern-style food and toast­ed sand­wich­es, so it could be a good com­pro­mise spot for a cou­ple with dif­fer­ent tastes. We notice it’s full of New World staff on their lunch­breaks, and there are plen­ty of mag­a­zines which makes it a good spot to eat in by your­self.