Golden Palace

A new arrival on the burgeoning Malaysian/​Oriental food scene around St. George’s Cross. Not the most picturesque of settings but it’s the food that’s important. The gents having a bit of hearty banter outside the pub next door during a fag break adds local colour.
The restaurant itself is teensy, smaller than some front rooms and clean. There is the standard large screen TV showing Chinese movies which is (usually) a sign of authenticity. The toilets are basic but clean.
The welcome is a bit hesitant but friendly enough and attentive. It’s difficult not to be attentive in such an intimate setting.
Golden Palace does several things well. but they are the wrong things:
— nice website
— nice printed menu
The rest is variable to poor. In brief:
1. Starter of ‘Malaysian style — sweet and spicy chicken wings’. Four wings: perfectly fine swimming in a spicy and excessively sweet gloop topped with chopped raw onion. Nice idea but too pricey for what you get and too much sucrose.
2. Nasi Lemak: the classic Malay breakfast dish but happily eaten at any time of day in Malaysia. The concept seems improbable: rice cooked with screwpine leaf to add fragrance, some raw cucumber and peanuts, a boiled or fried egg and one of several possible flavour options — chicken curry, fried or curried anchovies or cuttlefish sambal. Done well, it’s great.
The Golden Palace incarnation fails on several counts: flavourless rice, a fried boiled egg (the kind of thing Salvador Dali might have thought of but nowhere near as interesting), near-​incinerated anchovies, bony end bits of chicken swimming in a red sauce redolent of five spice powder.
As my companion put it: «The best thing about it was the cucumber.»
3. Char kway teow: flat rice noodles stir fried with prawns and bean sprouts. A Malaysian hawker dish, again sublime when well done. This was the best of the lot: the noodles were well cooked as were all the various components however much too oily and really quite flavourless. The ability to make a good char kway teow seperates the good from the average.
A return visit is not likely. There are plenty of more central, better value places serving better food of this kind in Glasgow.