Aseana Food Village: From Singapore to Mandalay
There are a very small handful of Burmese eateries in Sydney, and Aseana Food Village, is the only one east of the city. What makes Aseana Food Village unique is that, apart from showcasing richly spiced delights from the Malay Peninsula, the restaurant also specialises in the little-known cuisine of Burma. Most of the menu however, will be pleasingly familiar to lovers of Singaporean and Malaysian cuisine. This is the kind of food you’d find in an Asian food court, a market or a roadside stall – traditional, filling, tasty and cheap to boot.
Start with a Singapore hawker favourite, rojak, a surprisingly moreish of mix of sugar and spice that blends fruit and fluffy pastry pieces with a sweet, tangy and spicy sauce. The Malaysian-style nasi goreng (fried rice) comes with the traditional accompaniments – chillies, fried egg and crispy anchovies. You’ll also find steamed Hainanese chicken, sambal prawns, tender beef rendang, fried roti flat breads (oily but so very delicious dipped in curry sauce), and the chef’s special, spiced stewed duck served with noodles or rice. Aseana also specialise in bak kut teh (pork bone tea), a nourishing soup with a melange of Chinese herbs, spices and slow cooked pork giving it a sweet, peppery and fragrant complexity.
The Burmese dishes aren’t just token add-ons to the menu. There’s a worthy selection of traditional Burmese meals here, beginning with a range of fresh and tangy salads. These have remarkably strong, earthy, spice flavours, particularly the tea salad made from pickled tea leaves, onions, shredded vegetables and nuts. The bitter, black tea flavour is intense, combined with the already-potent qualities of the spicy dressing. This is a very unusual dish not often seen outside of Burma. For something a little tamer, the htaw baht rice (buttered rice with pork in tomato curry, pickled vegetables and spicy fried shrimp) is tasty, homely Asian comfort food that synergises perfectly with almost any Singaporean or Malaysian dish.
Lastly, the range of drinks and desserts are straight out of a KL coffee house (hands up if you know what a Milo Dinosaur is – they do ‘em here!). There’s teh tarik (frothy hot milk tea), grass jelly, and best of all, ais kacang (a crushed ice dessert with syrup, condensed milk, fruit jelly and beans) made with a vintage hand-crank ice machine.
Aseana Food Village is proving popular with Randwick’s Asian student community, and with its unique menu and prices pitched to please the penny-pinching undergrad, the rest of the population are bound to catch on fast.
Posted by Fiona Davies
