Coincidence…

I was pleasantly surprised to receive an invitation from John, a schoolmate of mine – we were in the same form in school but he was in the science stream while I was in the arts. His parents were celebrating their platinum jubilee  (70th wedding anniversary) and his father, his 90th birthday as well on New Year’s Day, 1st January…

Coincidentally, they were Julia‘s maternal grandparents – some of you may know that Julia would comment quite regularly in my blog and she’s currently studying in Perth, Western Australia and is presently home for the summer holidays. I guess John would be her uncle then?

Well, in keeping with the tradition, dinner commenced with the longevity noodles – the mee sua, the fried version…

…with the “golden” eggs.

Then, there was the chicken soup…

I was wondering why, since they were serving the soup, they did not serve the mee sua with it instead of frying it separately.

This was followed by the Four Seasons…

…but it looked like they had multiple seasons as they had a whole lot of everything in the dish.

Then came the duck stuffed with glutinous rice…

…which was quite all right but I had better ones elsewhere.

The steamed fish was very nice though…

…and despite it being such a huge chunk, it was nice and soft.

I did not try the fish maw with vegetables…

…but I had quite a lot of their cereal prawns…

– I thought they were pretty nice.

Lastly, they had the fruit platter and the traditional Chinese deep fried pancake…

All in all, the food was good enough – I understand it came up to over RM450 a table. I do believe that for that same amount of money, we would be able to get something much better at a smaller restaurant but those smaller ones would not be able  to cope with such a huge crowd – 80 tables altogether in the grand ballroom of one of the leading hotels in town. Service was lacking as they only had a few part-timers trying to cope desperately with the serving of the food and also the drinks.

There were some entertaining moments for example when all the grandchildren, including Julia, went up on stage (and filled it to the brim) and sang and danced to the song “Celebration”  (KC & the Sunshine Band). I was sitting very far from the stage and was too lazy to walk all the way to the front so lucky Julia – I did not manage to snap a photo of her in action. LOL!!! There was a very good jazz band in attendance – and I thought they must have brought them in from Kuching or some place as we do not have one in Sibu or not that I know of  but Julia said that they were her cousins, all still in school… Gee! That certainly was a surprise – they were really very good!

I certainly had a delightful evening and a great start to the new year that evening – thanks so much, John, for the invitation…