My friend, Philip, is driving back to Kuching today and will fly from there to KL and then to China to visit his son who is doing his internship there before he goes back to the US. As he would be leaving, we went out for dinner the other night and this time around, the restaurant was open – the one where I took his son, Michael, when he was in Sibu around the end of last year.
Of course, we had the must-have…
…the fried cangkuk manis – personally, I like the ones here best.
I also ordered the bitter gourd with salted egg…
…which is also one of their popular dishes and I had not had their butter scotch prawns for a long time…
…so we had that as well.
I wanted sotong (squid) with soy sauce and dried chilies and I asked for a bit of salted fish as well, the same way some people would cook pork belly and it came out in a claypot like this…
It tasted all right but wasn’t anything to shout about.
Now, this one was the killer…
There were only three of us so I was quite reluctant to order their steamed fish (tapah) but I was told that they would give me smaller slices. Good grief! I did not expect a huge chunk like this and it would not be so bad if it had been nice – unfortunately, it wasn’t. The fish was not sweet – probably the result of having been frozen for too long…and was a bit hard. All in all, I would say that it was a disappointment and was nowhere near as nice as it looked.
The bill, inclusive of rice and drinks, came up to over RM80.00 but that was to be expected as we had fish and a big one at that.
So, do have a safe and pleasant trip back to the States, Philip and enjoy your stops on the way. Hopefully, we’ll meet again when you come back to Sibu around this same time next year. Take care and God bless!
...STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS! 