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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