The last time I counted, there were 88 restaurants in my Chinatown neighbourhood. And that’s not including the side streets. With so many long menus composed of hyper-regional or cross-regional dishes, it can be hard to choose a plate of noodles, to know what makes them good. And why.
That’s what the professor is for.
Lynette Ong is an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto, where she teaches and researches authoritarian politics and the political economy of development, focusing on repression in China. She chose Matahari, located at 39 Baldwin St., for our Chinatown meal. The Malaysian-born Chinese Ong, who left Malaysia at age 15, grew up eating char kway teow, so she is the perfect guide to the cuisine.
“The thing about Malaysian food is it’s sweet,” Ong warns me. “More than Thai but less than Cambodian, with a moderate spice.”
We almost don’t get a seat for lunch. In Baldwin village, that curious strip of Kensington Market and Chinatown, Matahari is just close enough to the hospitals on University Avenue to be deluged by workers at lunchtime. So if you’re coming, make a reservation.
Malaysian food doesn’t get a lot of press in Toronto because there isn’t much of it.
“If you look at the distance between the east coast of North America and Southeast Asia,” says Ong, noting that she’s only found three Malaysian restaurants in Toronto, “you understand why there are so few Malaysians up here.”
But also, it’s harder to summarize than other, more focused cuisines of the region. Our meal, owing to the ethno-geography Ong is about to school me on, is like a potluck where all the guests are from different Southeast Asian countries: curries, fried noodles, dried fish and tamarind all living in harmony. On the plate at least.
Since fleeing poverty in Fujian, China, Ong’s family has been in eastern Malaysia — the country occupies two land masses, on the northern edge of Borneo and the peninsula at the southern tip of Thailand — for four generations, longer than it’s been a country.
A British colony until the Second World War, when it was occupied by the Japanese, Malaysia declared independence in 1957. In 1969, there were race riots in reaction to inter-ethnic wealth disparities across the country. An affirmative action law — still in effect today — was put in place with the aim to lessen the imbalance in wealth.
A constitutional monarchy where Islamic law operates in precarious balance with civil law, Malaysia, as described by Ong, is a true melting pot, perhaps owing to the steady economic growth in the last 40 years. Despite racial tensions that she says are largely trumped up by politicians to obfuscate widespread corruption, everyone eats each other’s food.
“But the fact that you have politicians divided along ethnic lines doesn’t help with racial integration,” she says.
Just as the lecture on Malaysia’s demographics is wrapping up, food starts arriving, soon covering our table with the evidence of the country’s overlapping cultures: flat rice noodles fried with shrimp, chives and eggs (Chinese char kway teow, which has begun to pull back from its fatty heritage, no longer as commonly made with lard); coconut milk rice served with fried onions and dried anchovies (Malay nasi lemak); chicken curry (a curry that is supposed to be Indian but tastes more Thai); chicken and noodles folded into a syrupy soy sauce (Chinese hokkien mee); a warm salad (achar-achar) of pickled beans, cabbage, carrots and pineapple made pungent with a hint of belacan, a dried shrimp paste that is a cornerstone of Malaysian cooking.a curry that is supposed to be Indian but tastes more Thai.
“The wok isn’t hot enough,” Ong says, pointing at the char kway teow as I shove noodles into my mouth. In Malaysia, everyone has a wok range in the kitchen and it would be difficult to rent an apartment without one. A wok burner lets you get a higher flame than a stove element. So she’s particular about how hot it has to get, to achieve the crispy and chewy balance with the noodles.
My heart belongs to the nasi lemak, which I would gladly eat for daily breakfast, as they do in Malaysia (often wrapped in banana leaf), if there were enough toothpaste in the world for my fish and onion–hating wife to let me sleep in the bed ever again.
In Malaysia it’s almost always about 30 degrees, plus humidity. So we’d be eating this kind of meal outside, after dark, sipping on beer, coconut or sugar cane juice.
“It’s like hot yoga, all year,” says Ong. “So at night, people sit down outside and drink beer and eat.”
People sit outside at plastic tables covered in the border-hopping foods of China, Indonesia and India, and, like anywhere else, when they’re done debating if it will rain or not, they talk politics.
Traditional media is, in part, run by the ruling political party, UNMO. But in the last 15 years, Internet penetration has grown in urban areas, enough that people have access to alternative sources of information.
Still, when Malaysians want to talk about what’s really going on, like the Pan-Malaysia Islamic Party introducing a bill to parliament calling for stricter implementation of Islamic law — which could result in stoning and amputations for theft — they have to get together to gab in person.
“Food is as essential to life in Malaysia as it is in Italy,” says Ong. “It would be difficult to have a meaningful conversation without food.”
