culture
Spice City Toronto: Gourmet Satay Offers Up Classic Malaysian Cuisine
Dishes at the new Scarborough restaurant are carefully prepared and packed with flavour.
Photo by Sarah Efron.
One of the absolute best Southeast Asian restaurants in the Toronto area is Gourmet Malaysia, an oversized dining hall in Scarborough with a massive menu of Malaysian, Indonesian, and Singaporean favourites. In September, the owners opened a new spin-off restaurant called Gourmet Satay at 1348 Kennedy Road near Ellesmere Road in Scarborough.
Although the restaurant hasn’t yet had its official opening, fans of Gourmet Malaysia have noticed the similar sign at this dodgy strip mall on Kennedy and started popping by. The narrow restaurant features many of the same dishes as Gourmet Malaysia, but owner Amy Lim wants to add some specialty “hawker” or street food dishes here soon.
A flyer for the new joint describes it as “food court style,” meaning it serves dishes sold at bustling South Asian food stall markets. (In fact, it’s similar in some respects to Gourmet Malaysia’s precursor restaurant, the now closed cult classic Gourmet Garden.)
The dishes at Gourmet Satay are carefully prepared and packed with flavour. The satay doesn’t taste like globs of peanut butter, but instead is made of fresh crushed peanuts and a surprising amount of spice.
Nasi lemak is an eye-pleasing dish that offers a sampling of the wide range of flavours in Malaysian cooking. A mound of coconut-sweetened rice is surrounded by rich curry-leaf infused chicken, sweet shrimp, a fried egg, and a punchy garnish of dried anchovies and peanuts—all for just $8.80.
Read the rest at Spice City Toronto.
Spice City Toronto explores Toronto’s great hole-in-the-wall restaurants and strip-mall joints serving food from all corners of the world.