Make you happy…

Last week, when my daughter was still home for the holidays and her friend/coursemate was in town, I took them for a dim sum breakfast here…

I had tried it once before and was not too impressed by what I had. However, I had since heard a few people praising it to the skies, claiming that the chef was from China and the dim sum would be the authentic stuff yadda…yadda…yadda…but honestly, I did not think it was all that great. Still, I wanted to take my daughter and her friend and my missus as well there seeing that they had not tried the dim sum there before.

Of course, the place is very nice, three storeys altogether or is it four?

It is one of the more popular places in town where the local folks would host their grand dinner banquets for weddings, birthdays or anniversaries. We were early so there wasn’t anybody else around at the time.

I ordered the char siew pao…

…which I thought was all right the first time around. I wouldn’t say the skin was the best but I would think that the char siew filling had an edge above the rest. There was a little bit of something in the taste that made it seem a little bit nicer than those that we could get elsewhere.

The har kau was very nice…

The skin was translucent (though it is not that obvious in the photograph), very fine and of the right texture. They were also very generous with the prawns inside…unlike some places where one would find a solitary prawn, that’s all.

I ordered the three-style siew mai again…

…and I had the yellow one and I liked it very much. I wouldn’t know about the other two as somebody else had those. I wish they would not serve it in a set or combination like that as I would prefer to order more of the one(s) that I prefer singly.

The chee cheong fun (with char siew filling) was good too…

…but the fried yam cake was a disappointment…

It was soft and wobbly, obviously the result of too much flour and too little yam…and besides, my mother-in-law makes much nicer ones.

The lor mai kai…

…wasn’t what I expected – something dark brown like those Chinese/Hokkien bak zhang. Instead, it was white…

– something like what I had here and even though it tasted all right, between the two, I would think the one that I had at the other place was nicer.

The captain who took our orders said the their Foochow-style fried noodles were very nice…

…and indeed, we thought it was good except that it wasn’t exactly like what we know it to be. For one thing, it had a lot of extra ingredients other than the usual few bits of pork and green vegetable. I remember once I was buying some home at one of my favourite places in town and I paid extra for some extras to be added – fish fillet slices, sotong and what not and it turned out to be less delicious than usual. I guess when it comes to these things,  it would be best not to deviate from the original recipe.

All in all, the general consensus was that the dim sum was pretty o.k. (though I personally feel that they could do with a little less msg) and considering that the bill only came up to RM35.40 for all those orders and free flow of Chinese tea, I certainly wouldn’t mind dropping by for the same once in a while for a change.