Las Vegas Chinatown is a largely undefined area that starts near the intersection of Spring Mountain and Valley View and runs well past Jones. It's expanding rapidly, and the restaurants are improving almost as quickly. A case in point: Banana Leaf Café, on a street called Schiff Drive, which runs between Wynn Road and Valley View. It's difficult to spot from the street and often overlooked.
Finding it is worth the effort. Just bear in mind that it caters mainly to Asians, so much of what you eat here will be terra incognita for anyone who has never been to Asia, or the LA suburbs.
Banana Leaf Café shares a name with one of my favorite restaurants in North America, Vancouver's Banana Leaf, where the specialty is fish-head curry, a giant bowl of gravy with a huge stewed fish, head on, in the middle of the bowl. They call this dish the same thing here but leave the head in the kitchen. Other than that, the food here is almost exactly as it is in Singapore or Malaysia, where most people take their daily meals in hawker centers or from hawkers set up literally on the streets.
Malaysian food rocks, an amalgam of three great cuisines: Chinese, Indian and Indonesia. This is a simple, brightly lit place with stylish wooden chairs and atmosphere kept to a minimum, unless Malaysian Tourist Board color photos of Malaysian cities count as atmosphere.
I wouldn't dream of coming here without starting with one of these homemade rotis, Indian crepes cooked in the oven, served with chicken curry sauce. On my first visit here, I watched a Spanish-speaking cook stretching out the dough on the front counter, a white, diaphanous sheet, later to be stuffed with a choice of fillings. For $3.50, you can get roti telur, or egg-stuffed, one of the city's great treats for the price. Murtabak mamak, stuffed with a ground beef and egg filling, is a dollar more.
Malaysian rojak is one of the more exotic salads on the planet. Picture a platter of fruit and vegetables, doused in sweet black soy dressing, laced with tiny, pungent dried fish. It may be an acquired taste, but it is an easy one to acquire. Baby-oyster omelet and seafood roll, like an egg roll stuffed with seafood, are also good. The most Malaysian of the soups is bah kut teh, a pork-rib soup redolent of medicinal-tasting Chinese herbs.
Naturally, there is satay—marinated, grilled meats on skewers—accompanied by a peanut dipping sauce. Many people think of satay as a Thai dish, but it is really Indonesian, and is eaten everywhere in Malaysia. This satay comes in hefty chunks, crusted with spices like coriander and ginger, six skewers to an order. Bet you can't eat just one.
Malaysians are also great carbo-loaders. One of the glories of their street fare is char kway teow, rice noodles laced with dark soy sauce, cooked egg, chicken and shrimp. I loved my noodles, but a friend told me hers were greasy. Another noodle dish not to miss here is Indian mee goreng, a fusion dish combining egg noodles and Indian spices.
There are a raft of rice plates, two of the best being nasi goreng, Indonesian-style fried rice, and nasi lemak, a mound of coconut rice surrounded by various dishes. Nasi goreng comes in a round metal tiffin, or snack box, a huge portion topped with a fried egg and a few pieces of kerupuk, or shrimp chips. It's loaded with beef, chicken and shrimp, and is big enough for two to share.
One of my favorite entrées here is rendang, stewed beef (or lamb, if the whim strikes), simultaneously braised and stewed in a mixture of coconut milk and spice until it achieves a dense, soft texture that is almost pudding-like. A little hunk flavors a pitcher's mound of rice, and the dish is almost ridiculously filling.
Chicken is cooked in a variety of ways here, such as the headily spiced chili chicken; an oily hacked-chicken dish called Hainanese chicken, eaten with chopped garlic and oil rice; and Indian chicken sautéed in a mild curry sauce. I wouldn't bother with the fried chicken. That's one thing we do better in this country.
Banana Leaf Café is one of the only restaurants in Chinatown to feature skate, just one of a vast number of seafoods that include fresh clams, Chilean sea bass and jumbo prawns done in at least 10 ways. There are interesting vegetable preparations, too, such as kank kong belacan, water spinach sautéed in shrimp paste, lady finger belacan, or okra done the same way, and Ipoh-style bean sprouts with salted fish, an acquired taste that is not so easy to acquire.
Wash it all down with the juice from a fresh young coconut, or perhaps, a glass of soymilk laced with jet-black cubes of grass jelly. What, you were expecting Diet Coke?