Coco Asian Cuisine

Midtown really needs a good Malaysian restaurant. I'm always craving Malaysian flavors yet there isn't anywhere really close by to get delicious dishes like mee goreng, Buddhist yam pot or rendang. One year ago today, we were out in central Jersey, and it was the perfect opportunity to grab some Malaysian food for lunch at Coco Asian Cuisine in Edison. (Coco apparently has a branch in Elmhurst as well but we didn't know that when we went. They also have Thai food but we (and everyone else we saw there) were there for the Malaysian food.)

The one thing we knew for sure that we were getting at lunch was roti canai, our favorite Malaysian appetizer.

Roti canai is a "Malaysian crispy Indian style pancake served with curry chicken and potato dipping sauce." The chicken here arrived a little more "whole" than some other places but was tender and easily broke up in the curry sauce. The curry was delicious, but wasn't as rich as some of the others we've had and it was thinner as well. The pancake was crispy and chewy in parts, and that soft chewy texture is one of the delights of roti canai (at least for us).

We debated between getting noodles or the $7.95 lunch special. The lunch special had a variety of dishes (mostly rice dishes), which came with soup as part of the special. We decided on the specials.

The soup was a simple vegetable soup - a flavorful broth with some cabbage and carrots. It was mild but good.

A chose the Hainanese chicken, described on the menu as a steamed half chicken with bone in at room temperature with chef's special soy sauce. We had tried Hainanese chicken in Singapore years ago and found it to be a really fresh and delicious dish.

Although I like steamed chicken like this, I was glad that A chose this instead of me because of how roughly they cut the chicken and how much skin there was. Not my type of thing. A was really disappointed with the chicken itself. Normal Hainanese chicken comes with a minimum of two sauces, and this came with one. A even emailed a picture to his brother and sister-in-law (who is from Singapore) and they both agreed that sauces were missing. The chicken was cooked okay, but the lack of sauces was really noticeable.

The rice that came with the Hainanese chicken was really nice, though. It was nice and rich, and the chicken flavor was very evident. The chicken stock also made the rice nice and fluffy.

I went with the string bean belacan with chicken, which was sauteed chicken with string beans, red and green peppers, and shrimp paste chili sauce.

It had been quite some time since I'd had belacan (the Malaysian shrimp paste) in a dish, mostly because we rarely get to go for Malaysian food. When we were living in Chicago and regularly visiting the late Penang (which sadly burned down after we left), we often got vegetable dishes that used belacan as one of the ingredients, and really enjoyed the pungent unique flavor. I was happy with this. It had great flavor and tasted healthy from all the vegetables. I would love to be able to make this at home.

Malaysian cuisine is a bit scarce in Manhattan and I'm not sure why. It's so delicious. With all the Thai restaurants everywhere in Hell's Kitchen, couldn't we just make one of them a Malaysian place? That would be amazing.

Coco Asian Cuisine is located at 1803 Lincoln Highway (Rte 27) in Edison, New Jersey.