Yes, the Madras Lane folks used the term “curry laksa” - the line gets blurry as one moves between Malaysian states and cities, and Malaysian hawkers are as guilty as anyone else in misnaming their wares. But usually, one gets away with calling a dish “laksa” in West Malaysia when the noodle used is the thick rice noodles, which is invariably called “laksa noodles”, and which has the thickness of spaghettini.
But over in Sarawak (East Malaysia), their famous Sarawak laksa uses “beehoon” - thin rice noodles with the circumference of vermicelli. I remembered a Sarawakian friend in Singapore who cooked the Sarawak laksa and invited a bunch of us over for dinner. We were all perplexed then and a couple asked him, “You call this laksa?!”.
In Johore, the local Johore laksa used spaghetti pasta for noodles - a tradition started by the Anglophile Johore sultan Abu Bakar, who encountered the West’s answer to noodles during his trip to Europe in the 1860s.
The Terengganu curry mee you encountered is not typical of the East Coast states, but is a copycat of the famous Hoi Yin curry mee from Kuantan, in the neighbouring East Coast state of Pahang.
The style of curry mee there is pretty similar to Kuala Lumpur’s (where they got the idea, I’m sure), and is very palatable to the local Malays, who make up 60-70% of its clientele. The proprietress is Chinese - a certain Madam Tan, who came to Kuantan from Taiping (a North-western town in Malaysia, with a food culture similar to Penang’s, actually) over 30 years ago. She’d not looked back since.
