There are more Vietnamese restaurants in Orange County than there McDonald's; but I only need one hand to count all the Malaysian, Singaporean and Indonesian restaurants put together.
I'll prove it: For Indonesian, there's Garden Grove's Warung Pojok and Lake Forest's Indo Ranch. Anaheim's Dutch Club Avio could be considered restaurant if it served Indonesian food at predictable times, but it doesn't.
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As for Malaysian, there's Tustin's Belacan Grill. Singaporean? I guess the Chomp Chomp Nation food truck counts as that country's representative. That's four.
And now Old Malaya Grill in Huntington Beach has opened. It debuted last week, and goes into the Malaysian camp, serving murtabak, char kway teow, mee goreng, satay, and nasi lemak–and that's just from what I can glean from the pictures it has posted on its Facebook page.
I welcome Old Malaya Grill and hope for the day that I'll need the fingers from my other hand to count restaurants that serve food from this region in our county.
9072 Beach Blvd #F, Huntington Beach, California 92648. (714) 697-5052
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Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.