Do you remember me…

Yes, I do remember quite vividly that when the Ruby Restaurant here in Sibu first opened many, many years ago, it was owned by a couple. The wife was from either Taiwan or Hong Kong. It became quite popular then, especially for its signature dish – the pandan chicken…

Pandan chicken @ Ruby Restaurant (under its present-day proprietors)

Then the restaurant changed hands and the couple left town. I don’t know whether the present owners of the place were the ones who took over or there were others at the time but word went round that the food was not so good anymore, so I did not bother going for quite sometime.

Eventually, the couple came back and they opened Dynasty…

…and I went there a couple of times. The food was all right but what I did not like was that the people could not speak Hokkien or English and I had a tough time, trying to make myself understood…and on more than one occasion, I had to resort to Malay in a Chinese restaurant! In comparison, the Ruby boss and his wife were both conversant in English and the Chinese dialect, so I felt more comfortable there. Besides, later when they came out with some yummy dishes like their butter scotch prawns, mayo-lime lamb and so on, I never went back to Dynasty ever again.

Finally, after all this time, I went there again yesterday for lunch. Actually, we wanted to go to Hotel Zuhra but the food at the counter was running out and I didn’t want to wait for them to refill, so we headed to Dynasty instead – which is just a stone’s throw away in the next block. I must say that I appreciated the fact that they tried to practise good hygiene and soaked everything in hot water….

We had the kiam-sor hay (salty and crusty prawns)…

…that tasted good and different from the same dish at other places, probably due to the variety of ingredients used in the preparation and the garnishing. The cuttlefish with dried chillies was very delicious too…

Normally, I never liked this sort of cuttlefish – the type they have in jiew-hu eng chai (sotong kangkong) and preferred the white type. But I was pleasantly surprised that they managed to do a good job with it and it definitely was to my liking. Other than these two dishes, we also had the salad tofu…

Again, the dish was different from elsewhere. The tofu was coated with some very tasty batter and even the mayonnaise was different. It was not the plain straight-from-the-bottle stuff. They had some ingredients inside like garlic and spring onions and I must say that they did a pretty good job. For the vegetable dish, we had kangkong fried with belacan (dried prawn paste)… 

Oops! I did it again! I think I had ordered too much and there were only two of us…and partly because the servings were so substantial, we had a hard time trying to finish off everything. I would think that there was enough food for at least four or five people!

And the bill came up to only RM35.oo inclusive of rice and drinks. Last week or was it the week before, I went with another friend to Ruby and we had two meat dishes and one veg and the bill totalled RM28.20…and they even wanted that miserable 20 sen! Obviously, some people need to learn that little things mean a lot, even if it is only the rounding up of the figure by a difference of a mere 20 sen. More often than not, it is such token goodwill that keeps drawing the customers back to the same old restaurants and eating places again and again…