Borneo made three pages in The Times just the other week, thanks to the ongoing tragedy of the destruction of the rainforest there (it’s gonna die, we’re all gonna die, and nobody seems to give a toss) and where a few years ago the word Borneo, if it came up in a column like this, could not pass without a joke about headhunters, nowadays one cannot let it slide without talking about the trees.
Did you know that half of the world’s tropical hardwood comes from Borneo, and that much of it is traded by Mitsubishi? And there you were driving around in your Shogun 4x4 thinking that the only issues of conscience you were involved in were the clogging of streets, the killing of children and the pollution of the air. But no, you are also endorsing the rape of an Eden you will never see, but will miss when it is gone. An Eden which is, ironically, one of the few places in the world where your stupid car would come in handy.
They’re only pretending they want to plant palms for oil here, by the way. What they truly want is an excuse to chop the trees down so they can sell the timber – palm oil is a lowland equatorial crop not suited to steep uplands, and anyway the oil is either for bio-diesel, which could easily be made from sustainable sources, or for margarine, which is so revolting on a crumpet I can’t imagine who thinks it’s worth the extinction of gibbons, pythons and clouded leopards. A third of the island’s tree cover – each tree sustaining around 1,000 insect species – has been razed in the past 20 years. It twists your stomach so hard it’s difficult to eat.
But eat I must. And for a recommendation I turn to reader Helen Oon, who hails originally from Sarawak and has been writing to me for years suggesting oriental restaurants, until finally I succumbed. Sarawak, as I am sure you know, is one of the two Malaysian states on the island of Borneo (the other being Sabah), which also comprises the Indonesian provinces of East, West, South and Central Kalimantan and the independent sultanate of Brunei Darussalam.
“Would you like to review Awana in Chelsea with me sometime?” she wrote most recently. “It opened at the end of last year and is quite good. The starters and main courses are authentic but the Malaysian dessert is a bit of a ‘banana cuisine’. I would like to hear what you think of this first posh Malaysian restaurant in London.”
As I stroll down towards Chelsea I should just explain, to anyone who doesn’t know, that Helen did not mean that all they have for pudding at Awana is bananas. In Malaysia, and in much of the East, “banana” is a slang term for Westernised Orientals – people who are “yellow on the outside but white on the inside”. My mate Cheng, who features whenever I review dim sum, is one of these (but he doesn’t read my column so he will never clock the insult). For Helen I cannot speak. She left Borneo a long time ago, 30-odd years, I believe. But I saw only her outside.
In Eastern food, as in people, authenticity is all. I do not write as much about Vietnamese, Thai and Indian restaurants as I might because the discourse there is all about fidelity to an original of which I have only limited knowledge – aficionados of these cuisines are constantly looking for a repetition of the 48-course banquet they had for ninepence on the beach at Co Pi Pi or Co Poo Poo or wherever it is, when they were wasted on dope (“a kilo for, like, a fiver”) and pausing briefly in a cut-price trek across South-East Asia in the Seventies and Eighties, laying the foundations of the tourist rape of the area that followed.
But Malaysian and Singaporean I know a bit about, having toured the region with a cricket team on a trip as notable for the wondrous food we ate as for the fact that we beat the national team of Singapore and I was bowled out, I kid you not, by a “chinaman” bowled by a Chinaman.
Awana is big and low with uncovered tables, linen napery, witty polyurethane parodies of the famous Malaysian songket woven fabric, and lots of bright, orange wood (I didn’t ask where it came from, I just kept my fingers crossed). It looks very chichi, very expensive. And is. And as we ate our way towards a boozeless bill of nearly a hundred pounds, Helen explained that rich Malaysians will not eat here, regardless of the excellent and authentic cooking, because “these kind of prices they will pay only for Western food”.
And thus they will miss out on some very good satay (though perhaps Malaysians reach an age, not long after 25, when they have eaten enough satay); some excellent, light roti canai served with a rather bland (though no blander than usual) dahl sauce; really punchy rendang daging (though the beef was chewy, as it always seems to be in this dish); lovely fluffy organic tofu sautéd with fresh mushrooms and pak choi in a rich, glistening sauce; and chunky butterfish wrapped in banana leaf (green on the outside, white on the inside) so that it steamed in its lemon grass, coriander and chilli.
Now, the lobster char kway teow. I love a char kway teow. Flat rice noodles fried, ideally, in lard, with garlic and soy and chopped fresh chilli and then usually prawns and pork crackling. Here in Chelsea they do it with lobster, natch. It worked fine. But it’s one of those dishes where the poncy ingredient is not necessarily an improvement (one thinks of a lobster club sandwich or salad niçoise with fresh tuna). It was authentic enough, but lacked the fiery rightness of what I ate at trestle tables at the bottom of canyons of overhanging air-con extractors in the back streets of Kuala Lumpur, with rats at my feet and greasy plastic bowls stacked on the tables with a tub of filthy warm water in which to rinse them before eating. There, the noodles are cooked on the street in a wok as big as a hatchback, on charcoal that flames and roars and crackles like a lidless manhole over Hell, and the guy has a professional lifespan of, they say, ten years before the heat and smoke and sparks send him gradually blind (but before he goes, boy, does he shift some noodles).
Disappointments included some lamb rump so high that I fear it may have been going home a little (the sort of thing which, if it is meant to taste like that, I don’t mind, but if not, then God help me), and the otak-otak, a set fish pâté steamed in lime leaves, which was as close as a man should get to sucking a fishmonger’s insole. But then it’s always like that, so it is probably unfair to call it a disappointment.
In all: very good cooking with flashy design tweaks in a rather starchy environment. And that, if you’re after fitting in with the Chelsea scoffing scene, is just about as authentic as it gets.
Awana
85 Sloane Avenue, SW3 (020-7584 8880)
Meat/fish: 4
Cooking: 8
Other: 6
Score: 6
Price: £80 for two without booze.
Click here to book a table at this restaurant
Singapore Garden
83 Fairfax Road, NW6 (020-7328 5314)
For me, still the best Malaysian food in London. At odd times of the day and night their Singapore laksa or fried hokkien mee or kangkong belacan comes to mind and I fly down there and hammer on the door till they feed me. Now owned, or part-owned or something, by the same people as Awana.
Click here to book a table at this restaurant
Eatzone
18 Fortess Road, NW5 (020-7485 0152)
My local noodle bar. Crap name, great char kuay teow. No lobster.
E-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk if you know somewhere good, and maybe we’ll go there together
