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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