It might be you…

Well, it did not take long for me to find out who it was, my friend home from Australia, that the guys here mentioned the other day. I guessed it might be him, home from Perth, and I was right! It’s been over a year – the last time he came back was sometime in August last year and this year, he made another trip home as there was a wedding in his brother’s family here so he was kind of busy over the weekend. When it was all over and done, he got in touch and asked me and the ladies in the house out to dinner with a few of our ex-classmates.

He asked me to suggest a nice place so I opted to come here…

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…that I have been to a number of times and I did enjoy what they served each time.

Of course, I had to order their signature dish…

…the prawns with young coconut flesh in the very nice and rich gravy, slightly spicy but not really noticeable, served in a coconut and another signature dish of theirs, the pork served with cincaluk (fermented shrimps) dip…

The meat was much nicer this time around…

…but I thought the dip could do with a bit more cincaluk. It was extra spicy though, obviously the result of the use of cili padi and of course, some of us loved that very much.

We had the cangkuk manis fried with egg…

…and also the midin (wild jungle fern) but I was too lazy to snap a photo of that as the place was not all that bright plus the yellow lighting would not do much justice to the dishes served.

I did not take a photograph of the very nice steamed fish that we had either. It was an ikan lajung, a freshwater fish that I felt was a lot nicer than the more popular but cheaper ikan tapah. I did ask if they had the ikan bawal hitam (black pomfret) which would be nice too, deep fried and served with sweet and sour sauce…but the guy said that they only had the frozen ones, probably something like the one we had here but perhaps, a lot bigger, implying that it would not be all that nice and for those of us that would not settle for anything less than the fresh ones that we would buy from the wet market, we probably would not enjoy it very much.

When my friend ordered the fish, I knew it was going to be a somewhat expensive dinner…and true enough, together with the Foochow-style tofu soup…

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.,..which was good but I thought it was better the last time we had it here…plus the rice and the drinks and the ngor bee th’ng, my favourite in town, that some of us had…

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…the bill came up to around RM200.00 for the eight of us altogether. I guess that came as no surprise but according to my friend, it was quite all right as it would work out to around AUD70 altogether only and there were so many of us whereas, where he came from, one would be hard-pressed to get a nice full-course western meal for one person for that kind of money.

Of course, what mattered most was the chance to get together once again and catch up with one another’s lives and talk about the good ol’ days. Thank you so much for the dinner, Michael – and till we meet again, God bless!