Night…

On their first night in Sibu, I picked up my friend from Singapore and his friends from the hotel and took them to walk around the pasar malam (night market) in Sibu…

They wanted to buy a lot of the things on sale to eat but I kept reminding them to save some tummy space for dinner…

Nonetheless, they did buy a bit of this and that including some very nice satay – they were 50 sen each here and 60 cents in Singapore which means that even without converting, it would still be more expensive there. I got them to try this Foochow delicacy…

…from my childhood – the yew chang koi (fried shallot cake) which is actually something like chee cheong fan but not made in flat thin sheets served with fried shallots and light soy sauce. They liked it so much that when they went back there the following night, they had that again!

After walking around the place and sampling some of the stuff here, I took them to this restaurant for dinner. We had their butter scotch prawns…

…and the pandan chicken…

…both of which they enjoyed a lot as they had not had anything like these before. Even the pandan chicken was different, they said, in that they marinated it differently and it came across to them a bit like satay and they thought that made it extra special and very very nice.

Needless to say, they simply must have the midin (wild jungle fern)…

My friend said that they could get these at selected places in Singapore but they would be very expensive. They also loved the cangkuk manis/mani chai fried with egg but I did not take a photograph of that – you’ve seen it in my earlier posts already…many times. They also enjoyed the sea cucumber shop that we also had and they kept saying that it tasted like sharks’ fins soup…without the fins.

I ordered the fried mee sua…

…but they were not too thrilled by it – they all thought our Foochow fried noodles…

…were very much better (despite the fact that I would not say the one here is the best in town). My friend said that he had had the same at Yong Peng but this one would beat that one hands down.

When my friend asked the rest to guess the total on the bill for the food, one said RM200!!! Oh boy!!! In fact, it added up to only RM70.00 (slightly over SGD25.00) for the 7 dishes for 5, 4 adults and a child. I guess we had prawns and we requested for the bigger ones or it could have been a little less. Never mind! At least, for them, it was dirt cheap and they all enjoyed the dinner very much, their first on their visit to our good ol’ little Sibu town…(to be continued)