Pandan Leaf

The spicy pleasures of Malaysian food come to Brookline

by Robert Nadeau

250 Harvard Street (Coolidge Corner), Brookline; 566-9393
Open Mon - Thurs, 11:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m.;
Fri and Sat, 11:30 a.m. to 1 a.m.; and Sun,
noon to 10:30 p.m.
AE, MC, Visa
Full bar
Sidewalk-level access

When I noticed that Pandan Leaf would be moving into the space that Zuxuz had occupied until recently, I could feel a tectonic shift coming. In the early 1970s, a wave of Szechuan restaurants swept over the suburban spaghetti joints of Boston; in the early '90s, Indian and Thai restaurants moved into the old Szechuan niche. Now a fourth spicy Asian cuisine is looming. Will a host of Malaysian restaurants move in on all the marginal New American bistros?

I could live with that.

Pandan Leaf is not a clone of Chinatown's popular Penang, though it offers several of the same dishes, such as roti canai, coconut shrimp, and a seafood taro pot. There are several novel specialties here, and the menu makes a good effort to explain the terms of the Malaysian kitchen and table to newcomers.

One of the most remarkable new dishes is Malaysian yee sang ($24.95 for two; $39.95 for four), translated as "Tossed to prosperity raw fish salad." The story is that this elaborate mixed salad is a popular New Year's feast among the Straits Chinese, who brought it from Shantou in the 19th century. I've never heard of any region of China where people eat uncooked fish as a festive dish, so I think the raw fish joined the salad in Malaysia. Certainly this is a dish with which to begin or end a prosperous year.

What arrives at the table is one platter of raw salmon; another of goodies that include fried wonton squares, shredded ginger, and orange strips of dried jackfruit or mango; and a third platter of fine rice noodles. A waiter mixes the contents of the first two platters into that of the third, adds two sweet sauces, and tosses to "prosperity," or at least until we've reached a kind of Asian salad heaven. The dish is most easily eaten with chopsticks, each bite encompassing a considerable variety of flavors and textures.

Gado gado ($6.95) is a more modest salad with an equally delicious Indonesian sweet-hot curry sauce on top of hard-boiled eggs, crunchy jicama strips, green beans, bean sprouts, Asian greens, and really great homemade shrimp chips.

Our favorite appetizer, though, was the Pandan Leaf lobak ($8.25). The lobak itself is shredded pork loosely rolled into a crêpe; the rolls are served with triangles of excellent fried tofu, fried shrimp in a crispy pancake breading, a salad of shredded carrot and turnip, and iceberg lettuce leaves that you can use to wrap the various treats. The accompanying blackish-brown things are quartered "1000-year-old" eggs, their gelatinous texture and pungent flavor a fine foil to all the fresh ingredients. The dip for this is a sweet red-chili sauce, and there's a dish of cilantro leaves for extra zip.

Roti canai ($3.25) and Pandan chicken ($5.95) will be familiar to anyone who has eaten at Penang. The latter is seven chunks of boneless chicken breast, wrapped in pandanus leaves and deep-fried. The leaves end up with almost no discernible aroma, but at least the name of the restaurant is honored, and who doesn't like fried-chicken appetizers? The roti canai has an excellent, paper-thin-but-tough pancake to dip in a hot Indian curry, the only disappointment being that our cupful contained a couple of potato slices and none of the promised chicken. It's an excellent hot yellow curry, however.

We didn't hit a weak entree in four tries. Barbecued stingray ($12.95) was delicious, with a mild roasted ray served on the bone -- actually an easily discarded plate of cartilage -- and barely tipped with a spice rub. A fresh chili sauce on the side adds any heat you want. The diner who likes broiled scallops and can put aside the idea of stingray will love this.

Indonesian chicken ($9.75) was a whole boned chicken breast, wings on, fried in the immortal Indonesian way (coconut milk gets in there somewhere). The chicken, with spice in the breading, is hacked into strips, served atop raw onions, and accompanied by a syrupy dip with a chili kick.

Belachan-flavored vegetable with beef ($9.95; also made with pork for $8.95) might alarm some diners familiar with belachan, the strong-smelling fish paste used as a dip in Malaysia. But the belachan here is in a little dish on the side; it's also cooked into the mildly spicy brown sauce, but cooking completely dissipates the aroma, and leaves only a savor that greatly enhances vegetables -- in this case, snow peas, green beans, red bell peppers, and onions. The beef is like the sheer essence of Yankee pot roast, and the whole is served on noodles.

Char kway teow ($7.75) is an eggier, soy-inflected version of pad Thai, the noodle dish no one can resist in Thai restaurants. With chives instead of sweet turnip, and your choice of shrimp, pork, or beef, char kway teow promises to be the noodle dish no one can resist in Malaysian restaurants.

The rice is Chinese-style, sticky enough to eat with chopsticks and somewhat aromatic. The default beverage is water. There is a wine list, but I can't imagine matching a wine to this food. I can easily imagine beer and, on certain nights, those quasi-tropical mixed drinks my wife calls "umbrella drinks."

For dessert, Pandan Leaf offers bubur cha cha ($2.75), a hot, sweet coconut soup with bits of taro and yam, and also tapioca and red jellies. Two other desserts, which diners may find edible but odd, are served over shaved ice. Air batu campur ($2.75), abbreviated as "A.B.C.," is mostly coffee-flavored, with red beans, assorted jellies, and sweet corn beneath the snow. I take it as a cross between Hawaiian shaved ice and those glasses of syrupy mixed beans served in Vietnamese cafŽs. For more serious jelly action, there's chendol ($2.75), which is more generically syrupy on top, but which underneath the ice features surrealistic turquoise pasta, more red beans, and a greater variety of jellies. The green jellies allegedly are made with the eponymous pandanus leaves, but the flavor is still too subtle for me.

Pandan Leaf takes full advantage of the whimsically postmodern painted woodwork it inherited from Zuxuz. Service is very good, and the menu makes an excellent attempt to explain all the dishes in English. One could make many happy visits exploring this cuisine.