At PappaRich in Flushing, Queens, the glass of tea looks almost a foot tall. It has strata, like an ice-cream sundae: an inch of black under a band of creamy white and then pale butterscotch-brown to the top.
You’re meant to stir it together in a clatter of ice, although it’s worth stealing a sip from the bottom first, where the gula melaka (palm sugar syrup) lies, its flavor lusher than cane sugar’s, dark and buttery with a hint of caramel. You control the tea’s sweetness by deciding how much to disturb the depths.
On the menu, this is called three-layer tea. Malaysians also know it as a teh C peng special: “teh” for tea, brewed with a touch of sugar and poured back and forth between pots from a great height, to make it froth; C for Carnation, the brand once synonymous with evaporated milk, the white at the middle; and “peng” for ice.
Is the version here as good as on the streets of Kuching, a city in Sarawak, a state on the island of Borneo in Malaysia, where three-layer tea was first poured? I don’t know, but I drank it to the dregs.
I tried to resist PappaRich. I was unsure of it, because it’s part of a restaurant chain, founded in Malaysia more than a decade ago, with more than a hundred outlets around the Pacific Rim; because a friend in Singapore likened it to a fast-food joint; because the Flushing outpost, opened last year, is on the second floor of a blandly modern mall.
But as dish after dish arrived (so many that the waiter brought an extra table), I gave in. Here was beef braised seemingly forever in coconut milk, beautifully slumped with all its knots undone, making a virtue of indolence; fish and shrimp paste spread inside crinkly rectangles of tofu skin and slipped into a bowl of curry laksa, the soup’s surface flecked with melted fat; and fish heads mobbed by okra and eggplant in a curry so luxurious, I couldn’t stop dragging strips of roti canai through it and watching them turn to gold.
For more read the full of article at The Nytimes.
