date: 8/29/07
location: minneapolis
grade: b

peninsula is one of the many eat street places that can get overlooked in the crowd. it's closer to azia than to jasmine, say, in what they're styling themselves as, with malayasian cuisine. the interior is upscale, with lots of dark colors, wood, and not the typical things on the wall (like tie-dye, for instance). it's large, and roomy. a nice space. (though the music is a bit odd... mostly modern rock.)

the menu is very vast and hard to choose from, since malayasian cuisine is a mixture of influences, there's indian, chinese, and well, just a bunch of traditions all over the southeast asian map of cookery mixed up in the menu, plus some malayasian favorites. they helpfully include pictures, by the way. and there's not too many 'american' dishes on there, which is nice.

we started with a malayasian favorite (the menu says so... the all-time malayasian favorite, it is), a roti canai. it was a large, rectangular pancake of flat roti with a potato/chicken/curry sauce. nice, and spicy without being too spicy. the satay tofu was good, but i prefer the satay to have a bit more of a peanut flavor than it did. the tofu had a interesting texture- apparently they make it all there, so it's unlike tofu you usually get elsewhere.

for main courses, we went with kambing rendang (lamb simmered in coconut milk, chilies, ginger, cinnamon and cloves- cut and paste to the rescue), which was pretty good, i was told. the red curry jumbo shrimp with pineapple, onion and tomato was also tasty.

i went with the ginger duck lo me, as i was looking for something not too spicy, and low key. it's fresh egg noodles tossed in soy sauce served with ginger duck, and i think spinach. the duck was not too gingery, alas, and it was kind of hard to eat with all the tiny bones. i don't think of duck as something with tiny bones, so it was probably my bad. it was just hard to eat. the noodles were good, and the soy sauce wasn't all salt (they may make that there, too, i think).

however, the best dish was the vegetarian one, a mango tofu. the tofu was fried and it also had some bell peppers in it, in a perfect "sweet and tangy special sauce." the sauce was good on anything, really, rice, shrimp, noodles. that was spot on. the server said the mango dishes are some of the best ones on the menu. though it doesn't look like the vegetarian selection is huge at first glance (if you read the vegetable or tofu sections in the menu, a lot of them have shrimp paste or something in them and fish aren't vegetables), a good portion of the items are vegetarian upon request.

they pay attention to plating here, the dishes appeared at the table almost as if they were being posed for menu pictures, sitting nicely on impressive, heavy white plates of all shapes and sizes. service was good. there were a few things like spilling water on the appetizer plates then not getting new ones or wiping them off (i had to ask for extra napkins after i got the wet plate), but generally it was much better than that. (though i will say they appeared to be maybe a bit overstaffed for the number of people there.) i am not sure if the prices are a bit on the high side or just seemed to be so.

somehow i get the feeling that we all kind of thought that it was nice and all, but we're not sure we'd go back. eat street is hard to navigate to (especially sans bridge for some), there's just not enough to pull us back there that we can't get elsewhere. well, except maybe the mango dishes.