Char koay teow, a pan-fried noodle dish with shrimp and calamari served at Serai in Logan Square.
Brian Ernst/Sun-Times
What’s cookin’ in and around Chicago? Here’s a closer look at one of the area’s delicious dishes you don’t want to miss.
Growing up in Malaysia, Victor Low would get char koay teow after school with his best friend, whose dad was a vendor specializing in the pan-fried noodle dish.
“Every time when we would get picked up from school he would always have a packet [of char koay teow] for us. That’s how I grew up,” Low said.
It’s an everyday dish that Malaysians have for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It’s not something typically found in a restaurant because it’s street food or something you get at a night market, Low said. Once you find your go-to spot, nothing else compares.
“That’s how Malaysians are with food, they will drive far and long just for that one particular dish from that one particular place. It’s either that or nothing else,” Low said.
After living in the U.S., Low said a plate of char koay teow just like how it’s made back home “is like treasure. When you have it, it’s so good. But back then, we grew up with it and [I] didn’t appreciate it as much,” said Low, who grew up in Kuala Lumpur and immigrated to the U.S. to pursue his MBA in 2004 and has lived in Chicago since 2006.
“Once you go overseas, on those days when you just crave home-cooked food, that’s the first thing that comes to mind, that char flavor, right, that noodle. There’s nothing that comes close to it,” Low said.
Through his Logan Square restaurant Serai, (2169 N. Milwaukee Ave.), which serves traditional Malaysian dishes, Low and his business partner, chef Khoon Lew, aim to bring a taste of that to Chicagoans, from people like themselves looking for the flavors of home to those who are unfamiliar with the cuisine.
Serai’s version has shrimp, squid, bean sprouts, egg and Chinese sausage, seasoned with a mixture of light and dark soy sauce (along with some secret chef touches, Low said). The key to the dish is the wok toss, a testament to the chef’s skill in the kitchen. It takes a deft hand to achieve “wok hei,” which is the flavor imparted from the flames that engulf the wok during stir frying.
“Char koay teow is the chef’s skill on the wok toss, how he controls the flame and the flavor,” Low said.
He described the noodles’ charred flavor as “the sweet spot between getting burnt and undercooked,” Low said. It’s one of the distinctive characteristics of Malaysian cuisine, which blends three cultures. “You have the Chinese who migrated [to Malaysia], and then you had the local Malays, and then you have the Indians who migrated there. So over a few hundred years our culture is blended together so that the cuisine is so unique,” Low said.
Since opening in 2015, Low said he and his team have aimed to educate people unfamiliar with Malaysian food on the cuisine. Some of the restaurant’s other popular dishes include beef rendang, beef braised for eight hours in brown onion chili and coconut, and curry laksa, a spicy curry coconut milk soup with noodles, BBQ pork, chicken, shrimp, fish ball, egg and tofu puff.
The restaurant doesn’t try to “Americanize” the food or elevate it with different ingredients such as lobster in the char koay teow. That would defeat the purpose of serving Malaysian food, Low said.
It was a risk to lean in hard on Malaysian flavors when opening, Low said. They asked themselves, did they want to appeal to the masses or to Malaysians who are happy to find out the food tastes just like how they remember it from back home?
“That’s what we wanted [Serai] to become. And that gamble paid off. People come in and say, ‘This is exactly how I used to have it [at home],’ or ‘it reminds me of the store down the street where I grew up.’ That’s the kind of feeling we wanted to present to people.”