Hawker Favourites & Big Flavours at Med Salleh Kopitiam

Med Salleh Kopitiam is our restaurant of choice today for a wider family get together. Helping my husband haul our pram up the entrance stairs, I spot my parents rounding the corner at the end of the road. My sisters are already inside, although the restaurant is so big it takes a beat to find them.

You see, we’ve gathered here today because we specifically want a taste of Malaysian food.

We all went to Kuala Lumpur last winter, various grandparents, uncles and aunts, kiddies too, the eldest being in their 70’s, the youngest just 2. It’s long been something of a home away from home in our family story – a place of big hawker centres, smoky noodles and deeply fragrant curries.

So when we hear that Med Salleh Kopitiam in Queensway serves a fully halal Malaysian feast, we book a table and bring everyone.

There’s excitement and expectation. But mostly, we’re here to answer one question: is the food actually good?

Quick info on Med Salleh Kopitiam

• Restaurant: Med Salleh Kopitiam
• Location: Queensway, London
• Halal: fully halal menu
• Best for: group feasting
• Must order: beef rendang, char kuey teow, curry laksa, satay chicken
• Skip: Hainanese chicken rice
• Access note: lots of stairs and level changes (not pram or wheelchair friendly)

Find out more in the Med Salleh Kopitiam restaurant review below.

A brilliant satay chicken

We start with satay chicken. Four skewers arrive, lightly charred, tender and flanked by cucumber and onion.

The chicken is soft and juicy, nicely done, but it’s the peanut sauce that stops conversation. It’s the sort of taste that pulls everyone back into memory for a second.

It’s thick, silky and gorgeously savoury. Not sugary or thin, but dense and almost meaty in its richness.

Around the family table, the satay sauce becomes the first thing everyone agrees on. We come back to it long after the chicken has finished, dipping roti in, then bits of our own meal. It’s a triumph of a sauce, and one that needs bottling.

It’s a strong opening move. And one of the safer bets on the Med Salleh Kopitiam menu.

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A flaky, buttery, indulgent roti canai

The roti canai arrives next, and visually alone it’s reassuring, being blistered, flaky, and layered. It comes with a fried chicken leg and curry sauce. 

The chicken itself is fine (crisp, well-seasoned) but again, the curry sauce does the heavy lifting. It’s thick, aromatic, gently spiced rather than aggressively hot. Dragging roti and chicken through it together makes for a lovely marriage. 

Hainanese chicken is fine, but no more

The Hainanese chicken was one of the dishes we all judged most ardently, perhaps because we knew exactly what we wanted from it. Here, the flesh was tender, the skin silky, and the rice carried the savoury depth it should. But, it ended up being just an echo of the ones we’ve had in Malaysia.

It’s good. But it’s not quite as fragrant or luminous as versions we’ve eaten in KL, in casual settings. Those versions feel almost perfumed, shimmering with chicken fat and spices.

If you’ve never had it done that well before, you’ll enjoy it. If you have, you might compare.

Beef rendang to come back for

My mum orders rendang cautiously wherever we go because there are as many mediocre versions as good ones. After the first bite of beef, she swoons and bids us all take to taste it too.

Here, finally, is a version of beef rendang that transports her back to Malaysia. 

The beef is yielding and the spice blend is warm, layered, almost haunting. You taste lemongrass, galangal, chilli, and that toasted coconut richness that clings to the meat.

This is the dish that shows Med Salleh Kopitiam at its best.

Curry laksa is bold and comforting

The curry laksa lands steaming and abundant, filled with chicken, prawns, tofu puffs, egg, and two kinds of noodles swimming in a red-gold broth.

The flavour is layered with chilli, turmeric, lemongrass, shallots, and the broth has wonderful body. The tofu puffs are particularly satisfying, swollen with absorbed curry.

This is one of the best parts of our Malaysian feast at Med Salleh in Queensway. 

Char kuey teow delivers on wok hei hit

I’ve inherited my father’s love of char kuey teow, and this version makes me very happy.

Flat rice noodles are stir-fried with king prawns, clams, egg and beansprouts until glossy and smoky. Crucially, there’s that whisper of wok hei (the breath of the wok) that gives the dish its characteristic char.

It’s savoury with a faint sweetness, seafood brininess threaded through the noodles. Comforting indeed.

For me, this dish represents Malaysian cuisine beautifully with the trifecta of Chinese technique, Malay flavour, and street-level execution.

It’s another must order dish at Med Salleh London.

Teh Tarik & Cendol

We finish with Teh Tarik, hot for the grandparents, iced for everyone else. It’s wonderfully sweet, milky and nostalgic.

The cendol for dessert is more refreshing with its coconut milk, palm sugar syrup, and pandan jelly sliding through crushed ice. After the spice and richness of the mains, it resets the palate.

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Setting the scene for Med Salleh

Med Salleh Kopitiam is attached to the Malaysian-owned Berjaya Eden Hotel, which is a functional building in Bayswater that doesn’t immediately scream culinary destination.

Inside though, the restaurant expands into multiple rooms with dark wood floors and walls layered in photos and memorabilia. It’s larger than you expect, and on our visit almost every room is full.

It feels busy and energetic.

One caveat: there are lots of stairs, both up to the restaurant, down to the loos, and level changes throughout. It’s not particularly accessible for wheelchair users or prams. 

The wider Med Salleh menu

One thing Med Salleh Kopitiam gets absolutely right is breadth.

The Med Salleh menu stretches confidently from hawker-style snacks like oyster omelette and rojak, to nasi kandar piled high with curry stingray and sambal sotong. There are noodle obsessives’ dishes like mamak mee goreng and char mee, and rice purists plates like nasi lemak with fried chicken or beef rendang.

Even the vegan options are thoughtful rather than token, with vegan char kuey teow and vegan nasi lemak properly integrated into the menu rather than sidelined.

In short, this is food for people who want to eat widely and generously.

It’s particularly good for groups, like our own family meal, or nostalgic Malaysians, curious first-timers, anyone willing to order across the board and share.

That’s really the best way to eat here: not with everyone guarding their own plate, but with dishes crossing the table, opinions being traded, and favourites emerging by consensus.

What’s the pricing like?

Value-wise, the dishes are fairly priced for London. Yeah, when you mentally convert back to ringgit, it stings a little. Beef rendang for nearly £19 is a different proposition when you know what it costs at a hawker centre in Penang.

But equally, we didn’t endure a 13 hour flight to get it. For Queensway, the pricing feels reasonable. 

The one small gripe? We’d love extra roti available to order on the side. When the curry sauce is that good, two pieces simply don’t feel like enough.

Still, as a London Malaysian fix, it’s doing a solid job.

Final thoughts on Med Salleh Kopitiam

Although this was a larger family meal, we weren’t just here to eat well. With all of us around the table and memories of Kuala Lumpur still fresh, every dish arrived with a quiet question behind it: would it hold up?

The answer is that Med Salleh does (mostly) hold up. As a Malaysian restaurant in London, it delivers what it promises, with bold Malaysian street food, fully halal, in generous portions, served quickly in a lively space.

Not every dish at Med Salleh is as good as you’d get in KL or Penang. But the beef rendang, char kuey teow and curry laksa are strong contenders.

So our advice is: go hungry, order widely, and don’t skip the rendang. Best of all, bring people who will share properly. Med Salleh makes the most sense when the table is full, the sauces are being passed around, and everyone is arguing over which dish deserves the last bite.

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Med Salleh Kopitiam review
Address – 35-39 Inverness Terrace, London W2 3JS
Nearest Tube – Bayswater