Taste Good Malaysian Restaurant in Woodside - Restaurant Review

Taste Good is great. This Malaysian-Chinese hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Elmhurst serves some of the best food in Queens. No pretension, just flavor. Malaysian food brings a heavy dose of Chinese and Indian cooking to Southeast Asian flavors, and the combination is a winner.

Taste Good is small and crowded, but the staff and owners are friendly and attentive. The moderate prices and warm atmosphere encourage sampling the uncommon tastes of Malaysia and Singapore.

Taste Good's Malaysian menu draws from the flavors of China and India to make the many-flavored Malaysian-Chinese taste. The quality and consistency is high across the large menu, but your best plan is to order typical Malaysian and Singaporean dishes. On a less crowded afternoon in this cramped restaurant the friendly owners may even suggest a couple for you to try.

Start with roti canai ($2), an Indian roti bread to dip in a chicken curry sauce. Or Malaysian popiah ($2), rice crepes filled with sweet turnips, bean sprouts, and egg.

Noodles are a Malaysian mainstay. Singapore kari laksa ($5) is a spicy soup of noodles, bean curd, meat, fish cake, hard-boiled egg, and vegetables in a fish-based stock. Call it hangover medicine or simply lunch delight. Another noodle soup, Ho hee ($5), rice noodles with chicken stock and fish cake, is milder and delicious.

For main courses, my favorite is Taste Good's nasi lemak ($4.50). Coconut rice, curry chicken, hard-boiled egg, anchovy, cucumber slices, peanuts, and maybe a bit of pickled vegetable fill a rectangular plate. It's a homey smorgasbord dish, a great choice for sharing.

Taste Good also serves up more elaborate dishes, especially fish, like the curry Assam fish-head casserole ($16) or sizzling fish fillets with black-pepper sauce ($13). And on my next visit, I'm going to find out what Buddhist yam basket ($10) means to my stomach.