Home Fires

Whereas the Yazmin Malaysian restaurant in San Gabriel is refined, Little Malaysia highly regional and Kuala Lumpur toned down for some imagined American taste, Selangor is the closest thing in town to a vernacular Malaysian joint, with a cosmopolitan menu, a family feel and the kind of strong, rustic flavors you might expect to find in the food of a good Malaysian home cook. If you’re the type of person who says, “Let’s go out for Malaysian” as most people say “Let’s go out for Chinese,” a place like Selangor is probably what you have in mind.

Selangor sits in a corner of a deserted La Puente mall anchored by a shuttered Viva supermarket, hard by a discount store that has just folded. When you turn into Viva Square for the first time, it can be difficult not to think about fleeing, perhaps to the Mr. Cowboy beer bar up Hacienda, or to a burrito stand called Ed Taco, or even to the doughnut shop in the incongruously named Triangle Square. The vast parking lot is rarely occupied by more than a dozen or so cars.

Selangor, though, thrives. Inside, the restaurant is the usual clean, well-lighted place, cursorily decorated in a sort of jungle-thatch motif, with something that sounds like Indian film music purring from speakers overhead. A Coleman camping lantern hangs over the cash register; scenes of Malay village life hang on a wall. The booths are crowded with families--Malaysian, Mexican, Chinese, whatever--who sip on sweet Malaysian barley water and dig into large platters of shrimp.

The Malay salad rojak , a concoction of sliced fruits and vegetables dressed with a dark, sweet sauce, is crisp and fresh, less cloying than at many places, shot through with a dose of fermented shrimp paste that is stronger than usual but nevertheless marries the flavors of mango, pineapple and cucumber instead of overpowering them, as you might expect; the salad is tossed with delicious chunks of toasted tofu.

Selangor has its own take on the pu-pu platter, a mammoth plate heaped with shrimp chips, spring rolls and sticks of grilled-chicken satay, also some unusual things: crisp, curried-beef empanada sort of dumplings; fishcake-stuffed eggplant and tofu, yong tow foo ; the sweet-sour Malaysian pickle acar .

Chicken rendang is pale, long-stewed, a little stringy rather than tender but strong with coconut milk and spice. Bah kut teh , the famous herbed pork-rib soup that serves roughly the same morning-after function to Straits Chinese that menudo does in Mexican culture, is a strong, murky broth, fragrant with star anise, as hearty as other versions are elegant, full of tofu and ribs. Sambal shrimp, sauteed with onion and tart tamarind pulp, is sweet, pungent with fish sauce, highly spiced.

There are the famous rice dishes: Mellow coconut rice, nasi lemak, is served with small piles of spicy stewed smelt, squid, chicken rendang and tiny fish fried with peanuts; Hainan chicken rice, sharply pungent, comes with a musky chile dip and an uninteresting slab of boiled chicken; goreng kueh , grainy, little nuggets of housemade rice-cake, are stir-fried--blackened, really--with chile and enough garlic to flavor a kosher salami. The food at Selangor may not be polite, but most of it--save an oily Indian claypot fish curry and an overcooked plate of Singapore-style mee hoon noodles--has been pretty good.

But the real reason to drive out to La Puente, which to a Westsider is more or less on the eastern rim of the known universe, is the perfect bowl of assam laksa , which is the quintessential Straits Chinese dish. Chewy rice noodles in a strong fish broth made sour with tamarind and pineapple, studded with strips of cooked Spanish mackerel, flavored with onion, assam laksa is a sharply herbal whole but somehow a different experience with every spoonful.

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* Selangor Malaysian Restaurant

1429 N. Hacienda Blvd. (in Viva Square), La Puente, (818) 918-4718. Open Wednesday-Monday 11:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. (closed Tuesdays). Cash only. No alcohol. Takeout. Lot parking. Dinner for two, food only, $9-$15.