Aloha Oe…

If you are as old as I am, you would probably know this song from the movie “Blue Hawaii”, starring the late King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley but when I was younger, this song was more popular than the rest from the original movie soundtrack. These days, however, my favourite would be this one…

…which I still sing time and again at karaoke sessions and it’s a great song for weddings, I would say – very appropriate.

Well, for reasons known only to the proprietors, they decided to call their shop by this name…

…and I think I would be quite right to say that it is one of the most popular coffee shops in town – always crowded all the time and very difficult to get a table despite the fact that parking can be a real pain where it is located…

The main attractions here, I guess, would be the Sarawak laksa and the Sibu-style egg-wrapped fried kway teow but when my missus and I dropped by for lunch the other day, she had the kampua noodles (RM2.70)…

…and it was pretty good. I could detect the fragrance of the lard used in the tossing of the noodles the moment it was served.

Actually, I wanted to go there for the sole purpose of giving their ayam penyet a try…

I had had people telling me that the one here was much nicer than the one I had here, not as dry and so on and so forth.

Let’s start with the rice. For one thing, it was not wrapped in banana leaf so it did not have that squeezed texture similar to what one would find in nasi impit or ketupat and of course, it did not have the nice banana leaf fragrance either. It wasn’t plain white rice though – in fact, it was their nasi lemak. Unfortunately, there was so very little “lemak-ness” that one could barely detect the presence of its very very slight hint of it…and  that was why I thought they might as well not bother as one would hardly be able to tell the difference.

I don’t know if this is the sambal…

…that you would get if you order their nasi lemak but if it is, then I would say that it is not all that great. I’ve had nasi lemak sambal at many places elsewhere that is a whole lot nicer than this.

The complimentary soup was very good though – chicken and definitely not the usual plain water with salt and msg added that you would get at many Chinese shops and food stalls.

As for the chicken, it was HUGE – one whole thigh…

…but to me, it was just fried chicken…with traces of the oil used in the frying though not all that much. I could not see how it was any different as it was neither flattened not clobbered, and thus, not penyet. The only consolation was the fact that it was a bigger piece that the other place that I would frequent…plus it was cheaper by 50 sen.

All things considered, I wouldn’t think I would bother dropping by here for this again. In fact, I do feel that even the one that we had here would be much nicer…