Azalina’s super awesome Malaysian food

Azalina’s – 1355 Market Street, San Francisco – in The Market

I’ve been obsessed with Azalina’s since I discovered it in The Market in the Twitter building in San Francisco. I’ve eaten my way through the entire menu. I’ve always had a thing for Malaysian food – I love the aromatic and exotic flavours and how they reflect the combination of Indo-Chinese-Asian people living there.

My memories of Malaysia are of Penang. That city was my stop-off to see my grandparents in Australia and I remember the sound and excitement of the markets late at night. Malaysian food at its heart is colourful, exciting, experimental.

When she moved to SF, the owner and chef extraordinaire Azalina could not find authentic Malaysian food anywhere. This would be enough to make one run back to her hometown – Penang. But by then she’d met her partner Tim and around 2009 she started to invite friends over for dinner cooking the food she grew up with, from the Mamat group of native Malays. She associated each dish with happiness and the companionship of her family and friends in Malaysia, which she shared with new family and friends in San Francisco.

They launched their first permanent restaurant in February, and it’s brilliantly open pretty much all day every day of the week from 11am – 9pm. That suits me fine. I don’t like the way a lot of places in SF open up for limited hours and put you in a real pickle when you are overworked and hungry at 3pm.

They started as a travelling food stand in “Off the Grid”, a weekly street food / food stall event at Fort Mason and with Azalina’s training as a chef she presented key dishes, made how she likes to eat them. It was very important to her that each dish look as beautiful as it tastes.

Here is the current menu, in the photograph below, from September 2015 - they continue to add new dishes to their repertoire. Occasionally someone asks for an ALASKA instead of a LAKSA and clearly not everyone is familiar with Malaysian cooking, and why should they be? Malaysia is half way across the other side of the globe and there really are a shortage of good Malaysian restaurants in the world, let alone in California.

Laksa has many variants, many of which use fish stock as a base, which they thought wouldn’t appeal to western eaters who would wonder why all they had in a bowl was a spicy fish stock. So they altered it quite radically for the Bay Area eaters by making it vegan.

A key dish for all Malysian restaurants is the Laksa, a rich curry soup. Azalina’s Laksa is made with an intensely flavoured coconut based soup enveloped with lemongrass, turmeric and ginger. No meat, no dairy, all vegan and compellingly delicious. I particularly liked the attention to textures – the crunchy pre-fried noodles were both a garnish and a good balance to the unctuous soup where hot noodles lay in the depths below. Addictive. A triumph.

So then I asked Azalina and Tim who comes by to eat this food. Asians? Foodies in the know? Twitter staff? Tim described a broad cross section of people such as families with kids (my son also loves a good laksa), people travelling by from outside of SF, people catching a pre-theatre dinner, folks working or living in Hayes Valley or Castro, and there’s a local woman who keeps popping in who is two months pregnant. A local artist, Ira Yeager, likes their food so much that he gave them this painting of a tiger (a national symbol of Malaysia). He has a gallery in The Mission.

This next dish (see the photo below) is the Hokkien Mee. They had to change the name from the original Malaysian name Nee Mamak. No one really got it. People understand well enough that Hokkien is a group of people from South China and some people know that Mee is Hokkien for Noodles.

Here is Azalina’s Hokkien Mee, so utterly good with a generous sprinkle of onions, noodles stir-fried in XO Sauce and juicy prawns, plus a side of Sambal Asam – made of chili peppers that give the noodles an extra kick, and a drizzle of coconut milk to cool all the excitement down and balance. This really got me going.

I haven’t even described how the Tea Salad has a fermented special tea leaf sauce mixed with pineapple and fresh pineapple also in the salad. It’s so refreshing.

Each dish happens to have one of the following added on the side, complementing and juxtaposing the flavours:

• A sweet tangy chutney – made of tomatoes and tamarind, for example, in the Beef Curry – this dish is also another winner for me. The sweet cool fruity chutney balances the entire composition.
• Azalina’s own brilliant Sambal – made up of seven different types of chilli, each cooked in a different way and then allowed to rest for a few days and then finally puréed. Tim warns people to ease into it. For me, it is powerful and electric. Full bodied deep burnt crimson with a sweet and bitingly savoury piquancy.

Some of the ingredients are secret, and I want it to remain a mystery. Some ingredients are flown in directly from Malaysia.

Azalina and Tim want Malaysian cooking to become part of the vernacular of everyday food in America. I think Azalina should write a book, rather like the now modern classic Ottolenghi book.

I finished my meal with their delightful layered purple sticky rice pudding with almond and crème brûlée topping, a coconut milk, vanilla and cardamom center and purple sticky rice base. A fine way to end a meal and to end this post with.