Not the same…

I love kolo mee and I cannot imagine going to Kuching and not eating that before coming back!

Gerrie kept asking when we could go to eat the Old Oriental Cafe kolo mee, located where the old Cathay Cinema was formerly…but the problem was my daughter wanted to sleep late and I would rather let her so that she would be able to make the most of her holidays to rest, relax and enjoy before it would be time for her to go over to New Zealand and by then, it would be back to the grind for her. And by the time she got up, it would be too late for breakfast and too early for lunch.

So, on that day when we were coming back to Sibu – Sunday, while she was still sleeping, I sneaked off to a coffee shop next door to have a bowl of kolo mee. The Melanaus have this superstition that when people keep asking you to eat something and you do not, some untoward incidents/accidents may happen. LOL!!! Anyway, I thought what I had was pretty nice until Gerrie dropped by the hotel room with this…

She had tapaoed two packets of THE kolo mee for me (the way I used to when she and her siblings were kids…much to the distress of their parents as they were worried that they would all grow so fat! LOL!!!) and I just had to eat one of the two packets there and then. There was a world of difference between this one and the one I had earlier, believe you me! You may think you can just go to any stall and have your kolo mee but I can tell you in all honesty that it’s simply not the same. You will need to know where the good ones are and where to go!

I took the other packet home and my missus microwaved it to heat it up for dinner. Horror of horrors! It was really horrible!!! Tsk! Tsk! I am never a fan of the microwave and I just do not understand why people would use it to heat up food and ruin it completely! Try heating up kompia in one and throw it against the wall after that to see which one will crack first!

We also brought home some chai thow koi (Chinese carrot cake – which is something like the koey kah that we had in Prai) that I had bought for my daughter as she did say she wanted to eat that when in Kuching but never had the chance to do that…

Thankfully, my missus heated this up in a frying pan, so it did not share the same fate as the kolo mee! This one’s from a stall outside the coffee shop right next to the hotel where we were staying and was quite all right. The other one at the coffee shop at the far end of that same block was not open in the morning. I would think that one would be better as I noticed that it always enjoyed brisk business everytime I passed by the place.

Sophia picked us up at around noon and before she dropped us off at the airport, we went to this coffee shop…

…next to Central Inn for the Penang char kway teow. Sophia had the special…

…while my daughter and I had the so-called “normal”…

I couldn’t possibly eat a lot then, not after the bowl and the packet of kolo mee that I had had earlier.

Well, I thought the two were more or less the same and if you asked me, I would say in no uncertain terms that it was definitely not the same as the authentic stuff that I had had before on the island and in the surrounding areas. The kway teow, of course, was different and I very much prefer the smoother, thinner and translucent ones that they have in the peninsula…and tastewise, it paled in comparison too – very much so, despite the fact that the people operating the place actually originated from Penang!

In a nutshell, if you want to eat Penang char kway teow, you’ll just have to go to Penang…or the kawasan-kawasan yang sewaktu dengannya! Period. LOL!!!