The Times
Giles Coren finally caught up with the Malaysian ‘kopitiam’, or coffee house, near Queensway that rival reviewers raved about last summer – a “mad, gorgeous, nostalgia- driven passion project” that takes you “through some sort of time and space portal, into Kuala Lumpur in 1967”.
“But it’s not what I came here to review”, he mock-excused himself. “It’s old. It’s been reviewed. Sure, I didn’t know about it till last week, and nor did you, but we can’t have old restaurants reviewed in The Times. Only shiny new ones like, for example, Med Salleh Viet, [an] offshoot project about half a mile away on Chepstow Road… Which is so new the bright yellow and blue paint on the walls is still pretty much wet.”
The food here is every bit as delicious at Kopitiam’s, including standout hand-crafted summer rolls, “the rice paper case stretched tight over fat prawns, crunchy vegetables and herbs, so that they seem encased in edible polythene”.
