Hawker

Malaysian hawker food has always been a bit of a mash-up. Toss Chinese, Malay and Indian cooking into the melting pot, give it a stir, and it comes out as some of the most satisfying eating in the world.

So a new eating-house called Hawker from the same team that created super-popular Malaysian roti house, Mamak, is enough to rouse me from my cricket/tennis/darts-induced stupor.

While Mamak does the Malay/Indian thing, Hawker showcases the Cantonese (Kuala Lumpur and Ipoh) and Hokkien (Penang) influences. That means no roti bread, sadly, but char kway teow noodles, Assam laksa and hokkien mee noodles instead.

Owner/chefs Julian Lee, Clement Lee and Alan Au don't go so far as to make you visit different stalls to order different dishes, although that would have been fun. Instead, the large, casual dining room is filled with blond wood tables and little stools, serviced by a long industrial kitchen running down one side. The upside of having to queue for a table is that you can watch the chefs smooth batter into paper-thin apam balik crepes, chop -and -flip oyster omelettes, and insert temperature probes into great meaty wings of sambal stingray.

The stingray ($16) is a highlight; the charry, crusty skate wing dyed ruddy-red with chilli sambal, its soft, sweet, milky flesh as precisely striated as a tightly closed fan. It takes a good 20 minutes to cook, so fill in the time with an oyster omelette (or chien, $16), with four plump Sydney Rock oysters tucked into its creamy, golden rice-flour folds. A warm, freshly -made, unfried popiah roll ($8) is softly, gently bland, filled with a jellied mash of yambean (jicama) that makes it relentlessly moreish.

If you've only ever had laksa lemak, with its creamy coconut milk curry, then expand your horizons with a bowl of Penang's Assam laksa ($12), sour with tamarind, and nicely stinky with hae ko, a thick sweet, fermented shrimp paste. A chip-chop of cucumber, red onion, pineapple and chilli sits on top, and fat white lai fun (tapioca and rice flour noodles) lurk below. The terracotta red broth is lovely, with a bright, uplifting flavour and almost mealy texture from ground mackerel.

My char kway teow ($14) is somewhat over-cooked, the bean sprouts limp and the rice noodles breaking up. But it's still like meeting up with an old friend; rich with clumps of egg, nuggets of lup cheong, and even a few cockles ( (not the traditional blood cockles, but, hey, cockles).

Wan tan mee ($12) looks the part; the thin egg noodles swimming in craving-material dark, thick caramel sauce. Topped with barbecued pork and with a couple of cute dumplings in broth on the side, it doesn't deliver as much flavour as it promises.

There are multiple listings of deep-fried breads, banana and durian fritters, if deep-frying is your bag. Drinks are pretty simple – barley water, the ubiquitous Milo, and a crazy mash-up of sweet milky coffee and tea called cham ping that's good for the indecisive. The BYO-friendly Red Bottle liquor store across the street has Asian beers and spice-friendly whites.

The hawker market scenes on the walls only serve to strengthen the divide between this essentially mid-market street-food diner and the smoke, and sizzle and hustle and bustle of the real thing. But Hawker has a few things you don't always find in real hawker centres, like loos, air-conditioning, helpful young staff, and even (hallelujah) paper napkins. You can't have it all.

THE LOW-DOWN
Best bit: The bill.
Worst bit: There will be queues.
Go-to dish: Sambal stingray, $16.

Terry Durack is chief restaurant critic for The Sydney Morning Herald and senior reviewer for the Good Food Guide. This rating is based on the Good Food Guide scoring system.