Sedap

Though not at the most convenient location and the shop is quite small on a side that you can easily miss, the food is quite decent and there’s a great variety!
The flavour is spot on, and overall quite Malay. The prices per dish are also extremely reasonable, at an average of £6−8 per dish, what more can you ask for! The owner is quite nice and all in all id give it a decent score.
But. And there’s always a but. The portion is soooo small. I don’t eat a lot but I can finish three mains myself. Purely because they are just way too small!

First visit here with friends for lunch. We tried the chicken satay and transparent prawn rolls for starters, curry tumis prawns and Chicken with cashew for mains and kueh for dessert.
Very authentic tasting nyonya food with friendly service.
Highly recommended by a Malaysian.

Sedap is a little restaurant near Whitecross Market. Sometimes you just don’t feel like going to the market and it’s a relief to have an option for a nice sit-​down lunch. The lunch special is a good deal with an appetiser and a main, but I decided to try the hainanese chicken rice because I felt like comfort food. It was as I’d hoped, comforting and nice. I wouldn’t say it was amazing, but it hit the spot and my friend who ordered the prawn lemak let me try some, which was excellent. I tried the char kway teow but found it a bit too too salty for me. The beef rendang here is just ok and the chicken corn soup appetiser is not great, but I think some things on the menu are better than others and you just have to know what to get.

decent Malay thai sort of food. gets crowded during lunch since they carry some sort of lunch specials.
had the laksa and vegetables with shrimp paste. all tasted pretty good, as mentioned, laksa was very difficult to eat due to the kind of chopsticks given (silver korean type) and the noodles were thicker white vermicelli noodles that’s slippery as hell. shrimp tasted fresh too.
Overall, the food here was alright, more authentic than other places. price point: check!

Good authentic food, the char kuey teow is fantastic here. Had lunch with my parents (Singaporean and Indonesian) and they love the food here. Both think it’s the closest they can find to the ‘real’ thing in London. Just a short walk from Old Street tube and very convenient if you’re in the centre of town.
Staff are attentative and they are quick with the food, obviously stir fried noodles don’t take long.

I met a friend here at 1pm on a Thursday lunchtime and we both had the lunchtime special — which makes the quite pricey menu just about justifiable for lunch. It was £8 for a starter and main course.
I chose the spring roll, followed by the beef and broccoli with steamed rice. My friend had the chicken with cashew nuts. We laughed when the spring rolls arrived. Imagine the smallest spring roll you have ever seen, then shrink by a factor of ten. We did get two of them, but they weren’t going to make a dent in Tinkerbell’s appetite, let alone ours!
The main course was a lot heartier. A huge plate of white rice and apart from the different coloured meat, our plates were quite interchangeable. My beef had the texture of limp lettuce — and not in a good way. The vegetables were lovely and crisp and the only thing I ate that felt they deserved paying for.
The service was slow and indifferent. I was far too British, waiting for my friend’s main course to arrive before I started — so my food was cold when I got to it. Which did not help the poor beef!
I will not be going back, it was just too expensive for frankly mediocre food.

Really great Malaysian place I found while walking around my hotel. Very close to the Old Street tube station. I really love okra, so I had to try the Sambal Okra. It was great. Very fresh with wonderful spices. The woman suggested I get it with rice, so I got it with the egg fried rice. It was plenty of food, and I couldn’t finish the rice. Nice atmosphere with low lighting.

I was born in Singapore and lived there for the first 9 years of my life. I have a deep-​seated and irrational love of Malaysian food because of it. Whenever I’m near any place that might have Malaysian food, I seek it out. I once found great Malaysian food in some small town in Victoria in Australia. It’s all about the love and skill you bring to this fabulous cuisine.
This is one of those places that gives it a lot of love. It’s in the next generation. I met the current owner — her mom started it — and told her I’d be back next time I was in London.

I have only ever gotten delivery from Sedap.
My order always consists of their Penang char kway teow and Malaysian blachan chicken. The char kway teow is the best I’ve had outside of SE Asia, with good wok hei, giant snappy prawns, and bits of lard. If there were cockles in the dish, I’d be in heaven. As a lover of fried chicken, the blachan chicken with its shrimp paste funk, crispy skin and juicy meat is also a must have.

Malaysian food takes great skill to pull off.
When it is good, it is insane food for the gods.
When it is anything less than good it is pure meh.
Ingredients have to be totally fresh — spices have to be mixed just so —
and thirty seconds too little or too long over the heat and everything gets lost.
Even in Singapore, in famous places, I had lots and lots of Singapore meh.
And outside of Singapore — even in food havens like San Francisco or Hong Kong — the reliability rate goes to nearly zero.
But god is Straits food heaven when it hits!
Sedap is one of the few Malaysian places I know that hits, and hits consistently.
The menu is small — and this increases reliability.
Everything has been made a million times and tested a million times.
The place is small and run by a family associated with a famous hotel back in Malaysia.
The family is huge —– I think there were more people in the kitchen than there were tables.
Each one delivers the dish he or she made personally and watching the nonstop show of a zillion individuals all coming out with handcrafted dishes was entertainment all by itself.
And they all know the family recipes inside and out.
Fried chicken nuggets come with an insanely addictive spice mix inside that I can’t identify for the life of me but which still haunts me.
They are served in a sweet sauce that does not hide the addictive spice mix — but I wanted nothing to come between me and that spice mix.
And of course the frying and the batter were prefect.
A cauliflower and mixed vegetable appetizer sauteed in a different spice mix was another inhale-​me-​and-​love-​me item. (I recognized the dried shrimp paste as one of the players here.)
The famous Malaysian tofu’s fame is well deserved — (and tofu on a skewer can be plenty boring at other places.)
Rices were an unexpected treat.
They do a coconut milk rice to die for —
and surprisingly their plain old egg fried rice is far more savory, tasty — and better textured — then the fried rice you are used to having.
Note that nearly all Chinese, Thai and Southeast Asian recipes of whatever nationality you pick do a wonderful fried rice …
but this rice just was tastier.
The service staff (family members of course) were as nice as nice can be.
Note that good restaurants are hard to find near the Barbican.
Given the weakness of the local competition —
and the formidable quality of the food itself —
Sedap is a real keeper.

I came to Sedap as part of Yee Gan’s Malaysian jamboree and I was impressed with the place. As there were 10 of us we ordered a wide selection from the menu to sample. I particularly enjoyed the noodles, chicken curry and fried rice. The roti was good and complimented the curry well.
I would happily recommend Sedap to those seeking Malaysian food.

Das Sedap, was in der malaysischen Sprache soviel wie «lecker» bedeutet, hält was es verspricht!
Wir kamen hier in einer Gruppe von 10 Leuten als UYE und es wahr sehr hilfreich, dass wir vorher reserviert hatten, denn das Restaurant ist ziemlich winzig.
Zwei Leute von unserem Trüppchen kommen aus Malaysia und konnten uns so die besten Köstlichkeiten der Menükarte nennen. Wir haben insgesamt 3 Vorspeisen und 9 Hauptgänge untereinander aufgeteilt und somit von allem etwas probiert.
Ich kann nicht wirklich sagen, was mein Lieblingsgericht war, denn alles war superlecker! Vom Gurkensalat mit Chilli, Peanuts und Mint bis hin zum Crevetten-​Curry über die Satay-​Spiesse bis zum traditionellen Flatbred war alles ein Gaumenschmaus.
Auch das Dessert war sehr interessant, wenn auch etwas zu gummig-​geleeartig für mich.
Super war auch, dass der Tee immer wieder nachgefüllt wurde und dass wir schlussendlich pro Person nur 15 Pfund gezahlt haben, was ich als absolut fairen Preis empfinde.
Ich werde gerne wieder die Reise ans andere Ende der Stadt in Angriff nehmen um hier nochmals Gast zu sein!

Stopped in for dinner after a hot yoga class. We were hungry but feeling like we should be healthy. We ended up ordering half a crispy duck and Malaysian tofu. Both were really good, but honestly, I could have easily eaten twice the portion. They had a ton of reviews posted on the wall, and seems like they do fairly well.
I will probably go back because the quality was good, but the serving size left something to be desired.

«Meh. I’ve experienced better» is the right description for this review. Thanks Unilocal.I really want to like this place (and now that I work around the corner, I probably will still give it another try) I really do. It’s hard because this place comes highly recommended from many a fellow Singaporean. But being a Singaporean, and having tasted the food here, it’s really not up to snuff. Really.
We took on the lunch special today — £7.80 for a starter and main. Not bad considering most dishes on the menu were far beyond that price. In my quest to find the best beef rendang in town, (so far Tuk Din is still the winner) I ordered the rendang here. We also ordered the belachan chicken.
First off, I know we’re having a bit of a cold streak in London, but the food came almost stone cold. Obviously dished onto a fresh unwarmed plate. Meaning the rice was cold, and the rendang was already cold. The beef itself was lukewarm, but just barely. Given that there was a lot of excess water on the plate, I’m guessing this was last night’s rendang sauce, with today’s beef. Not acceptable. Additionally, the rice. Oh, the rice. You’re a Malaysian/​Chinese/​Singaporean restaurant… How could you possibly not serve jasmine rice?! Long grain rice is for the Chinese restaurants in the far reaches of Austria, not in the city of London.
The saving grace was the belachan chicken. It was done quite decently, and a bit of a throw back to my days of youth. It certainly didn’t have as much of a crunch nor as much belachan (more batter than belachan — i.e. prawn paste — sorry, I forgot to mention what that was) as I would remember it in Singapore, but oh well.
All in all, a sad meal, but I’m going to come back and try the laksa. And if it’s great, I’ll most definitely update this review, but for now. 2*s. :(

Sedap and sit down, lah! Sedap (apparently means ‘delicious’ in Malay) is a great little spot close to Old Street/​Clerkenwell which I was very happy with. The interior is much more homely than the large majority of the canteen-​type Malaysian places in London (C&R, Rasa Sayang, Bonda Café), and the prices are only fractionally dearer. The place itself is fairly small (about the same size as the upstairs of the C&R in Chinatown), but the staff were infinitely more attentive and friendly.
I ordered the Roti Canai (a buttery Indian style flatbread, called roti prata on the menu) and a beef rendang, whilst my fellow dining went for a laksa. The roti canai — although, like everywhere else, it was from a packet — was pretty tasty and much flakier than other places. Some may find it a little on the greasy side, but it was flaking like a croissant, so I really didn’t care. The rendang was a lot different from a lot of rendangs I’ve had here — the flavour was very peppery and, whilst not as good as some places, it’s definitely a solid choice.
I tasted also stole some of the laksa and was pretty impressed by it — the soup base itself had that seafoody taste which most variants of the dish in this country seem to lack. Only a couple of gripes: it was very coconutty which can make it quite sickly, although not to the point of wrecking the dish. Oh, and the chopsticks are the thin Korean type. Not easy to catch noodles with, unless you’re a Level 17 Chopstick Master with at least 23 dexterity points. It also could have been a touch hotter, but it was still fine.
Overall, nice place. Great in terms of location, and I’d be willing to go a bit out of the way to go there. Additionally, you can get away with £9−10 a head, so I’m sure I’ll be back in the very not-​too-​distant future.

Sedap is a wholly acceptable Malaysian joint just minutes away from the Silicon Roundabout. Offering a cosy homey atmosphere, polite staff, and enjoyable cuisine, it’s a restaurant that can readily go on my willing-​to-​return-​to list.
I quite liked our roti prata starter — a fried pancake that reminded me a lot of Chinese cong yu bing (sans scallions). Crisp and flaky, it paired perfectly with the chicken curry it was served with. Later on, the chicken char mee came across like a take on ho fun, and the rendang rivalled the flavour of the same dish at C & R Café.
I certainly have more to learn when it comes to Malaysian food, but as far as I can tell, Sedap hits close to home. At least, it sure hit my belly in just the right way!

The food actually tastes pretty decent and authentic. But unfortunately, portions were way too small for the price paid, and the atmosphere was lacking, due to the extremely tight and small space inside the restaurant.
Service was not friendly (but not rude either), but our food took forever to come, even though the restaurant was only half empty. Our bill took almost equally to arrive after we requested it as well.
With so many Malaysian restaurants in London as well as so many better places nearby, I think I’ll give Sedap a miss in the future.
The London Insider

YUM! Went here on a Friday night for a bit with a friend before a night out. We were able to get seated right away but the place was consistently busy through out the night.
Great service all the way through the night and even better was the great food. The pork dumplings were huge and the veggie spring rolls actually had a tasty veggie filling. The noodle dish we split was a Malaysian style dish and really flavorful with a kick (number 43, can’t remember the name). And, even though their on line menu doesn’t show it, Sedap has a little beer and wine list to offer as well.
I would definitely return to Sedap for a cozy dinner with attentive service and great food in the area!

We went here after the Barbican experience. And I was Blown away.
My Laksa was just the right amount of heat and grease with lots of goodies in it and my friend’s boyfriend polished off his curry with great gusto (although they did give him the wrong one).
Spring rolls– AMAZINGLY yummy.
The best was I normally hate malaysian desserts but their nyonya dessert hit just the right combination of stickness, sweetness and asianess. I would trek across town just for that.
MMM.

A mate of mine originally mentioned Sedap to me last summer as one of his top two restaurants in London. This week we finally got round to trying it together. Located on a rather nondescript patch of Old Street in Clerkenwell, this Malaysian restaurant helps bust through the myth that London’s not a great food city.
We began with the transparent prawn roll, which was a surprisingly complex starter with many commingling flavors (sweet, spicy, salty) coalescing around chili sauce and crunchy vegetables.
We also shared the roti prata with chicken curry, which is a dish I’m a huge fan of. Sedap’s take did not deter from the classic and I was glad about that. The roti was light and flaky, while the curry’s spice enlivened our palates as we ate every last bite of the chicken off the bone.
My dining companion always orders the chicken char mee and on this night he did not deviate. I had a few bites and it was no surprise to me why its his standby.
My body was crying out for veg so I got the coconut rice and an order of stir fried broccoli and mushrooms and to be honest, while fresh, it was kinda boring.
Next time I’ll try the Penang char kway teow!

I’ve been to Sedap (Malay for «delicious») a number of times and I’ve got to say that I’m not sure what Gigglegiggly was on the day he/​she went to the restaurant.
The best dish Sedap has to offer has got to be the Penang char kway teow. The first time I visited this place, 75% of the diners ordered this. Another time I was there, I was there with someone from Penang who declared it to be among the best char kway teow that he had ever eaten.
Among the other great dishes this place serves is the tow yu bak (braised pork in soya sauce) and the sambal brinjal. The former is, in two words, simply delicious. The latter doesn’t come cheap, but, the two times I’ve had the dish, it was delicious.
If you still have space, the nonya kueh is a must-​have for dessert, especially if you’re a fan of coconut-​based desserts. Kueh isn’t found in that many South-​East Asian restaurants in London, so this is a must-​have.
As a final point, the couple who run Sedap used to run a well-​regarded buffet at the Copthorne Hotel in Penang before moving up to London to set up the now-​closed Nyonya in Notting Hill. They’ve been doing this for many years, and have received a significant amount of praise for the food that they serve, back in South-​East Asia and in London, so I really do not know on what grounds the previous reviewer’s comments are based.