9. Roti Chenai: Where It All Began...

Unlike my inebriated introduction to the delights of KC, today it is lunchtime and I am stone cold sober. I was a bit tempted to down three bottles of bubbly for old times sake but refrained. At $10 Roti Chenai is the cheapest main on the menu. I have eaten a lot of roti in my time. Showing my age a little, but when I was in my first year of university and had just moved out of home I couldn't cook to save myself. Roti Chenai at Satay Village was $5 - a price even my student budget could afford, so I had it pretty much every night for dinner. Just can't go past that creamy coconut soup, exactly three lumps of chicken, and the roti bread itself. Fried bread: an invention deserving of a Nobel Prize.

My meal arrives. Now for the difficult part - waiting for the roti to cool down. A quick prod reveals that it is thermonuclear hot. The soup is creamy and pleasantly spiced. The eating of Roti Chenai is a delicate balancing act. Eat the soup too quickly and you are left with nothing to dip into. Eat too much roti and you are left with a glut of (admittedly very tasty) soup. Impatient, I tear off a hunk of bread. My fingers smart but it is totally worth it. Dip it into the curry - sensational! I dip three more squares. My soup-to-roti ratio is looking good. Time to tackle the chicken. Unlike some places, the chicken is on the bone. As always, there are precisely three pieces. Two white meat and one dark skin-covered piece that appears to be a winglet. The chicken is slightly tough to the bite, perhaps it has been stewing in a vat of soup for a while, though very tasty, soaked as it is in curry sauce. Not the protein-richest dish but what do you expect for $10?  And really it's all about that bread...

Cooling down, my roti has gone slightly crispy. I have two pieces of roti left and am running low on soup so I sop up sparingly. I shouldn't have had those spoonfuls of soup while I was waiting for my bread to cool. Oh well, hindsight is always 20/20... I peel a scrap of meat off my winglet and roll it in a piece of roti. Delicious! Problem solved.  Now the perfect ratio of bread to soup remains and I scrape up my last morsel.

So the big question - was it as good at noon as at 3am? Not quite. Alcohol famously enhances the flavour of food, which is why so many gourmands are raging boozehounds. But it is still damn good and you can't beat that price! A truly tasty trip down memory lane.