Laksa Luck

The most famous Malaysian restaurant in the Southland has always been Kuala Lumpur, tucked into the back of a maze-like neo-Carmelian Old Pasadena shopping mall. Kuala Lumpur’s soaring, whitewashed dining room, roughly finished, filled with light, punctuated with late-’80s art-director whimsy, looks more like a Soho gallery space than like an ethnic restaurant.

Kuala Lumpur is pretty genteel, and some Pasadenans who would never think of exploring the restaurants of the pan-Asian neighborhoods just a few miles southeast of here have for several years been as conversant with rojak , with beef rendang , with asam laksa as other people are with mint-leaf beef and tom kha kai in suburbs where Thai restaurants lie thick on the ground. Malaysian cooking, the original crazy-quilt Pacific Rim tradition, is one of the world’s most pleasant, most accessible cuisines.

I suppose I have visited Kuala Lumpur about twice a year since the restaurant opened, mostly for a quick bowl of tamarind-sour asam laksa noodles before a movie or something, but although the restaurant has always been pleasant, in recent years the food, oversweet and underspiced, rarely measured up to the intensely pungent stuff from the more “authentic” Malaysian restaurants. When I was specifically hungry for Malaysian cooking, I almost always headed for Yazmin in San Gabriel, whose chef, Ronnie Ng, took the kind of care tracking down and importing obscure Malaysian ingredients that I imagine La Toque’s Ken Frank does in procuring nearly extinct wild mushrooms. Plus, Ng pounded a curry like no one else.

But a couple of months ago, the Malaysian restaurant scene in the Southland changed. Yazmin, which had suffered in an overexpansion, shut down; so did another good place, Selangor, which no doubt found life too arduous in a largely shuttered La Puente mall. Ng and a Selangor chef moved over to Kuala Lumpur. And all of a sudden, Kuala Lumpur became really good, devastatingly good, fully deserving of all the old rave reviews still plastered on the walls. Any restaurant where Ng is cooking is automatically the best Malaysian restaurant in town.

Here you’ll find an “Indian” curry, eggplant fillets of fish poached to a perfect under-

doneness in a mild, complex yellow curry--which is perhaps not the fish-head curry, ubiquitous in South Asia, that the dish alludes to but is subtler and probably more pleasant to behold. Rojak is the classic Malaysian salad of sliced cucumber and jicama and dead-ripe mango, spiked with crunchy bits of fried bean curd, tossed with a dark, syrupy dressing of black soy, vinegar and the pungent dried shrimp paste blacan , a fugue of sweetness, funk and varyingcrispness.

Nasi lemak , rice boiled with coconut milk, is mounded in the middle of a platter and surrounded by little heaps of garnishes--spicy stewed squid, boiled egg, red beef curry and yellow chicken curry, tiny fish cooked with a tangle of sweet onions, fried peanuts--which you mix in to taste, sort of like a Malaysian variant of the Korean bi bim bap , but alive with the flavors of turmeric, chile and dried fish.

Sambal shrimp, spicy and sweet, are sauteed with tamarind and a healthy, stinky wallop of blacan ; the coconut curries are delicious. Coriander chicken, simmered and grilled in that special Indonesian way that makes the skin improbably crisp, is coated with a spiced, pale green cilantro-yogurt paste and is spectacularly good.

Not everything works here--an appetizer of squid and Chinese watercress calls attention to the mismatched nature of the ingredients; leek dumplings are flabby and dull; most of the fried noodle dishes are oily and uninteresting. “Spicy” beef salad, tossed with baby greens, seems like an nouvelle-ish leftover from the last regime. The won tons are no better than what you’d find at an average Monterey Park Chinese restaurant. And when you’re ordering for a crowd, the structure of the menu, which seems set up in an appetizer-then-entree sort of way that is incongruous with the way most people eat Asian food, can be disconcerting.

But stop in for a bowl of noodles and you’ll find some of the best food in the house: rich, chile-red bowls of coconut-milk-bathed curry laksa with chicken and shrimp, pully ha mee in a garlicky shrimp broth, or especially asam laksa , tapioca-rice noodles in a broth finely balanced between the sourness of tamarind and the sweetness of pineapple, the salt-tang of seafood and the bite of fresh chile heat. At Kuala Lumpur, the heat is back.

* Kuala Lumpur

132 W. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (818) 577-5175. Open Tuesday-Thursday, 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and 5:30 to 10 p.m.; Friday, 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and 5:30 to 10:30 p.m.; Saturday, noon to 4 p.m. and 5:30 to 10:30 p.m.; Sunday, 5:30 to 10 p.m. Closed Monday and Sunday lunch. Beer and wine. Validated lot parking (in De Lacey parking structure). Takeout. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Lunch for two, food only, $10-$13; dinner for two, food only, $15-$25.