Malaysia's cuisine reflects the swirl of cultures that have passed through the Southern Asia peninsula and stayed - from Chinese to Indian to European to the native Malay. Pandan Leaf, just down from Brookline's Coolidge Corner, would seem to have landed in the right place, in the heart of one of Boston's most diverse and cosmopolitan suburbs.
The restaurants along Harvard Street range from Russian to Chinese, Irish to Israeli, and the customers are just as varied, making the Malaysian newcomer a natural, yet another facet in a multicultural panoply. Even the owners of Pandan Leaf, from Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Vietnam, reflect this diversity.
Eating Malaysian food takes a certain spirit of adventure. That's because so many nuances are folded into each that the result is difficult to describe. Chilies, lemongrass, and coconut figure into the dishes, but there's also curry and soy sauce and lots of shrimp paste. Is this sweet or hot, mild or bold? One can ask this in the space of several bites from a single dish.
Pandan Leaf, a friendly if sometimes slightly disorganized place, presents a wide array of Malaysian cuisine, and does it quite well, for the most part. Gado gado is called a salad on the menu, although it is more voluptuous than that. Layers of water spinach (kangkung), green beans, bean sprouts, crunchy slices of jicama, and cucumbers plus hard-boiled eggs are topped with a peanut sauce spiked with shrimp paste. All these tastes converge somehow into a delicious whole, but with a more subtle effect than Westerners, weaned on burgers and fries, are used to. Crisp-edged barbecue beef satay is more straightforward and also quite good.
By the time our party has moved on to lobak, described by one of Pandan Leaf's managers as a Malaysian version of a pu pu platter, we're beginning to get the hang of eating Malay style. Sharing all the dishes on the table in a communal celebration in food works best.
We take a bite of a spicy pork roll (a little like a looser version of a Chinese spring roll), a bite of fried bean curd, a nibble of shrimp pancakes. Shared with friends, the platter, which comes with a spicy-sweet sauce and a second more fiercely hot paste-like one, makes a great beginning. The latter sauce with its heat and strong fish flavor is perhaps not for everyone, but combines wonderfully with the mild taste of the bean curd.
However, roti canai, another favorite Malaysian appetizer of Indian influence, also great to share, flopped on several visits. The paper-thin bread, twirled into a small hill on the plate, has to be served and eaten almost immediately after it's made, or it becomes rubbery. This version was so tough that it proved difficult to even tear into pieces to dip into the mild curry sauce.
I liked Pandan Leaf's beef rendang, the sweet and hot elements blending in with herbal hints of lemongrass; despite the long simmering it takes to infuse the meat with the spices, the beef is fork-tender and moist. Clams in a dark and seductively bouncy belachan sauce, a little hot, a little pungent from shrimp paste, just fleetingly sweet, are also pleasing.
The punch of anchovies in a bright red chili sambal is irresistible in a dish called sambal ikan bilis. It's all bright notes, sharp tastes, guaranteed to be memorable.
Several dishes, however, are so oily that interesting ingredients and flavors are overwhelmed. The spicy red sauce over shrimp separates on the plate, the oil seeping from the sauce in an unattractive pool. Green beans in belachan sauce (shrimp paste and chilies) are also too oily.
Other dishes seemed to need a little more care in preparation, particularly at lunch. Mee goreng is one of the most appealing noodle dishes in the Malaysian Indian-style repertoire, with a mixture of egg noodles, tiny shrimp, rings of calamari, strips of fried egg and pork, and vegetables all tossed with peanuts and sesame seeds. However, the mildly chili-spiked sauce is barely evident and the whole dish lacks oomph. Chinese rojak, a plate of mango, sliced cucumbers, and jicama served with a strong, dark sauce, is decidedly short on anything but cucumbers, making the $7.25 price tag rather astonishing.
Desserts from South Asia may be the most challenging for Americans. A Vietnamese friend happily ate bubur cha cha, a sweet, warm coconut-flavored soup studded with chunks of yam and taro. The rest of the party each dutifully tried a sip before returning to creamy coconut and ginger ice creams. An acquired taste, we decided.
The wait staff at Pandan Leaf can be distracted about remembering orders, particularly for large parties. A curry dish never arrived one evening, and after a long pause we ended up with two plates of ice cream rather than the one we had asked for. On the other hand, staff members are helpful about explaining dishes and making suggestions to those uncertain about what to order.
The breadth of Malaysian cuisine, with all its ethnic branches, makes Pandan Leaf a lucky fit with Brookline and for anyone who wants to explore a fascinating cuisine.
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