Here now…

My friend, Philip, loves those prawn noodles – the ones here with the udang galah (freshwater prawns)…

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…even though they are charging RM35.00 a bowl now. I guess for him, it is not all that expensive since it is just a little bit more than US$10.00…plus they cannot get anything like this there and I am pretty sure most everything there is selling at around that same price or perhaps, even more.

The ones that we had here in Sarikei, the tom yam ones…

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…and the regular ones…

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…are not much cheaper now either. The last I heard, they were already RM30.00 a bowl.

I was surprised that even though he had driven from Kuching to Sibu and back year in and year out, Philip had never heard of Jakar and never noticed it anywhere along the way…and he did not know that there is a restaurant there as well that is famous for its prawn noodles – the Peking Restaurant. I told him about it and of course, he would want to stop there to try so on our way back to Sibu that day, we kept a look out for the bazaar and we did manage to locate it…

…on your left if you are driving from Kuching to Sibu. We were quite dismayed to see that the restaurant was closed but a vegetable seller by the roadside, without our asking, told us that they had moved to the other side of the road. Good grief! I guess every strange face around would be there for the noodles so the locals would be able to guess instantly what he or she is looking for.

We drove over to the restaurant at its present location…

…and I noticed that they even have a nice air-conditioned section…

…with big tables probably for those grand Chinese dinners…

…but there were only two of those so my guess is that they can only manage to do it on a small scale.

We wasted no time at all in ordering the prawn noodles…

…and I must say that I enjoyed it a lot while Philip was torn between this one and the one in Sibu. For one thing, it was not overloaded with msg and personally, I do feel that when we cook anything with prawns, we really do not need any of that white stuff – the soup or the gravy would be very sweet and delicious already.

There were FIVE prawns altogether, cut into halves…

…unlike the Sibu one where you would get three halves only so that looks like you’re getting three prawns when in actual fact, there are only 1½, plus the last time I had it there, I thought they had added too much msg so I did not really think it was all that good.

Here comes the best part! That only cost RM19.90 a bowl which is considerably less than the ones in Sibu or Sarikei. We left the place and drove back to Sibu, happy and absolutely satisfied.

Philip and I left Kuching before 10.00 a.m. and it was about 6.00 p.m. when he dropped me off at my house. It certainly was a pleasant drive and a wonderful trip indeed. Thank you so much, Philip, for everything!