Malaysia Kopitiam, Washington, D.C.

My friend Leo wanted to go to dinner tonight, so he Metroed over and we ended up walking all up and down M Street looking for a fabulous place, and ended up at a highly rated Malaysian place called Malaysia Kopitiam. This was my first venture into Malaysian food, so I wasn't exactly sure what to expect. Leo's from Hong Kong, so he's had it before, but he's not expert on it, so we had the waitress just bring us dinner. The food reminded me a lot of Thai cuisine with some Chinese aspects, except the spicings are very different and almost remind me of Indian spices.

Our first courses were these interesting chicken and shrimp stuffed, fried, thin, burrito-looking things which had been cut into pieces, served on a bed of lettuce chiffonade, and accompanied by a hot, yellow tinged, watery looking sauce, and then another plate of what appeared to be a long roll of translucent white rice paper wrappers filled with chopped shrimp, scallop, and scallion cut into nine segments and arranged in a checkerboard pattern, accompanied by a peanut sauce. The second course included a lamb curry, with large tender chunks of lamb in a mild brown curry sauce, and a squid and shrimp dish, with large pieces of squid which had been scored and cross-hatched and were tossed with peppers, tomato, onion, okra pods, and some potato-like chunks, and all came with steamed white rice.

The last course included mango sticky rice liberally sprinkled with chopped peanut and a particularly interesting "Malaysian crepes" dish, which was made by taking two thin pancakes with a layer of sweetened, mashed green beans in between and pressing it on the grill to create sweet-crunchy areas on the crepe surfaces, and then the whole thing was cut into decorative shapes. It was very tasty.