Sophisticated, with street-market soul

The city and town centers in Malaysia where food hawkers congregate are colorful scenes. Street chefs fling their roti dough high in the air, stretching it kerchief-thin before cooking it on a heavy iron grill. Other vendors pluck live crabs from tanks to stir-fry with blazing chile sauce or operate groaning ice shaving machines to create frosty desserts. Demure ladies cook halal stews. Noodle sellers offer pastas that hail from just about every corner of China.

A new South Bay restaurant, the Belacan (pronounced b’LAH-chahn) Grill, has the live crabs, the chile stews, the roti and even the shaved ice desserts of a Malaysian street market, but its polished decor (crisp pastel tablecloths, hand-crafted textiles hung as art) and the considerable skills of its chef suggest an upmarket restaurant in suburban Kuala Lumpur.

Hidden on a quiet residential street in Redondo Beach, Belacan, one of the few Malay restaurants in Southern California, is in a remote location miles from other business areas, but evidently word of the place’s spectacular food has gotten around; already it’s a popular destination.

In the Malaysian style, the menu rambles widely over the regional map, offering coconut-rich Indian curries, Indo-Malay chile sauces (sambals), Chinese regional favorites and dishes that merged the peninsula’s immigrant cuisines long before “fusion” became a culinary fashion statement.

Sophisticated standbys

This interplay of influences -- the essence of Malaysian cuisine -- is already apparent in the appetizers, which are so good that before you finish eating them, you start planning what you’ll order on future visits.

Roti canai is as flaky as a mille feuille and porous enough to soak up the accompanying coconut milk-based curry, creating a slurpy mouthful that delivers just the right tingle of heat.

Chicken satay is fine but far less interesting than satay tofu, squares of bean curd grilled golden and stuffed with a sweet-savory melange of cucumber and peanut sauce.

Penang-style rojak, a toss of fruit and crisp vegetables in a dressing accented with shrimp paste, unites sweet, savory and salty in an exotic harmony.

These standbys are more polished than their hawker-center counterparts, but they haven’t lost a scintilla of their soul.

Malaysia’s famous chile crab is on the menu, but Belacan crab -- harvested from the restaurant’s tanks -- is the house specialty. The deep-fried stone crabs have a mist-thin crust that seals in their juices. Their seasoning of belacan, the salty-savory shrimp paste for which the restaurant is named, is to Malay cooking what fish sauce is to Thai or Vietnamese.

If you ask for a crab cracker and pick, you’ll be accommodated, but Malays simply bite down on the shell and suck out the juicy meat, which picks up flavoring from the seasoned exterior. Messy? Of course. But highly rewarding.

Nothing illustrates this kitchen’s attention to ingredient quality and precision timing better than its vegetable dishes. Large, firm okras, bright green and stir-fried with fresh red chiles, have just enough belacan to spark their flavor.

A dish called sambal petai includes petai, the wrinkly bean-like vegetables (which actually grow on trees) with a reputation as the Limburger of the plant world. To tell the truth, though, they’re less smelly than a good Brie, while their crunchy texture is marvelously suited to their aggressive seasoning of firecracker-hot chiles.

From Malaysia’s list of Indonesian-inspired classics comes the voluptuous beef rendang. In the hawker centers you often see vendors hunched over their stone mortars pounding the lemon grass, shallots and other seasonings for this curry. The coconut milk sauce can be a wretched oily red puddle, but in Belacan Grill’s version it’s a moist, thick curry paste with clear, beautifully delineated flavors gently clinging to the cubes of beef.

Both familiar and exotic

Another Malay favorite, Hakka-style young tau foo, is somewhat reminiscent of the dim sum pastry har gow: barely cooked chopped shrimp mounded into hollowed-out squares of silken tofu and set forth on a limpid pool of soy sauce.

Many questions are asked of Belacan Grill’s waiters, who do a valiant job of describing the likes of ikan panggang, sambal tumis or belacan kangkong.

But many dishes need little or no introduction: stir-fried scallion-ginger lamb, nicely pink inside; Hainan chicken, white-cooked and bland, the perfect counterpoint to spicier fare; Nonya-style steamed fish, with satiny flesh that flakes at the mere wave of a chopstick.

The service at Belacan Grill is, shall we say, conservative -- until the dessert, ice kachang, arrives and a cheer goes up at the sight of this baroque concoction. A towering shaved ice cone looks like Mt. St. Helens, with lava-red rose syrup lending a supernatural glow. Candy-sweet adzuki beans, salty peanuts and chewy cubes of jelly garnish the mound, like nuts on an ice cream sundae.

And a sprinkling of corn kernels adds a taste of the New World to this old-fashioned Malaysian favorite.

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Belacan Grill

Location: 2701 190th St., Redondo Beach; (310) 370-1831

Price: Dinner appetizers, $2.95 to $9.95; entrees, $7.95 to $15.95.

Best dishes: Roti canai, satay tofu, Belacan crab, beef rendang, Hakka-style yong tau foo.

Details: Lunch, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily; dinner, 5 to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, till 10:30 Friday and Saturday. No alcohol. Parking lot. Visa, MasterCard, American Express.