Roaming Zebra

So on Saturday evening, we decided to go to Satay in Lye for dinner. Its an Malaysian-Indonesian restaurant on Lye High Street. This is the third time we’ve been, the restaurant itself is quite pleasant with modern decor and the food is excellent quality. On the two previous times we’ve visited, its been quite busy - the first time was Valentines night and was a set menu, the second with a couple of friends and it was very busy. This meant that the food took a very long time to come out - its a good job we weren’t in a hurry! We’ve also ordered take-away before, though only once, and it took a very long time to arrive and wasn’t particularly hot by the time it got to us (we had to microwave some of it to warm it back up).

That said, I’d still recommend people to go there as the food is excellent … when you get it.

This visit however, the restaurant was only about half full and both the service and food were excellent. You seem to get Kurpak Udang (prawn crackers with a spicy tomato/chilli dip), these have always come out shortly after ordering, so in the past despite the long wait, we haven’t starved. The tomato dip is quite pleasant, though can be quite hot. We ordered the lamb and chicken satay starters (swapping half each) which are grilled pieces of chicken of lamb served with a peanut satay sauce. I really like them… however I’m still not sure about the chilled rice cake that comes as part of the starter. For main course, I ordered the Kari Kambing on the recommendation of the serving staff. Its a Malaysian Lamb curry and it was really nice - excellent flavour and the lamb was slowly cooked meaning it was very soft to eat. As accompaniment to the main, we ordered the coconut rice. Its a “Thai” rice, which is a different type of rice to the pilau rice served in curry shops. In terms of price, it has gone up since our last visit (some dishes by £1.50 or so), but even so, it used to be very cheap and now I still think the pricing is quite reasonable. I’d also give it extra points for being a place where they don’t try to rush you out with the bill as soon as you have finished your food.

One other thing to watch out for (and caught us out on our first visit) is that its not licensed - i.e. take your own alcohol. Luckily there’s a mini-supermarket at the other end of the High Street.

Overall, I highly recommend a visit to Satay, particularly if you’d like a change from visiting a Curry house (of which Lye has a number!).

Satay now has a website - www.mysatay.co.uk which has photos of the restaurant and copy of the menu - though at the moment, the prices on the website are the old prices (its gone up), and then the take-away pricing was always different from the “eat-in” pricing, so I wouldn’t assume the pricing is correct.