I’m taking a break now from my KL posts to blog about things that have been happening around here recently just in case some of you are getting a bit bored already.
Well, Philip, who was in KL to attend a relative’s wedding, was back in town too and his son, Michael, was around as well…so I asked the two of them out for dinner on the 23rd of December – in case everybody would be too busy with his or her own thing over the Christmas season.
We, my missus, Melissa and I, took them to the Ming Mei Shi Restaurant that most of you would be very familiar with by now…and since they’d come back all the way from the US of A, I thought I would treat them to something a little more than the usual. I would have ordered a full 8-course Chinese dinner but there were only 5 of us, so I had no choice but to trim it down a little.
The first dish was the Four Seasons plus one…
If there had been a full table of 10 persons, they would probably have 8 items in the dish. The almond flake-coated fish slices were absolutely fabulous and everyone loved the rolls too – thin strips of ham and cucumber and imitation crab stick wrapped in some kind of special white fibrous skin and probably deep-fried. The scallop balls in the middle were good as well while the Thai-style jellyfish with pineapples and the fish maw with snow peas were at best so-so to me, nothing great but that’s not saying that they were not nice.
Melissa loved the not-to-be-named soup at the wedding banquet in KL and since I thought she deserved something better, I ordered a little bit for everybody…and everybody loved it a lot.
Next came this thick slab of fish, tapah no less, with its special sauce and it certainly won praises all round…
…and so did the butter prawns…
Everytime I posted a photograph of butter prawns, somebody would ask me why we did not have those with the egg “hairs”…so this time around, I purposely ordered that just to show that we CAN get that here too – except that it is very common and we can get it at most other restaurants in town. I used to love it a lot when it first came into the scene many years ago but eventually I got somewhat bored with it and would rather go for other versions of butter prawns. Our friends from America, of course, enjoyed that very much and personally, I thought it was very well done.
Now, this was a disappointment! Fried asparagus with XO sauce…
…and not that it was not tasty but the asparagus was a bit too old. Tsk! Tsk! They should have asked me to order something else instead…but anyway, by then, everyone was already too full to mind it that much so we just ate a bit and left the rest behind.
Five dishes (including the soup) for five persons – normally, a complete Chinese dinner would have 7 courses for 10 persons plus a plate of fruits or dessert. Can anybody guess how much the dinner that we had cost altogether, inclusive of rice and drinks? Come! Let’s see if anybody can get it correct…
...STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS! 