Follow the crowd…

People say that if a place is crowded, the food is bound to be good. Well, we’ve been to this place…

…a number of times before and there have been hits and misses but for one thing, most of the time, in the morning, there will be a lot of people here, especially on Sundays.

I was there again last Sunday but this time around, I noticed that things weren’t exactly the same as before. The fat guy at the chu-char (cook & fry) place at the back was nowhere to be seen and they have set up a brick counter/bar there and are using that area to make the drinks. Other than the Malay lady, I am not sure whether the people at the other stalls are the same ones or not. I did not order anything from her but instead, I ordered this minced pork and fish bihun (RM5.00)…

…from the second stall, the one behind the kampua noodle stall. It was all right – I did not think it was really great and the soup was rather murky, not as clear as I would like it to be.

My missus ordered their Foochow fried noodles (RM3.80)…

…that came drowning in the sauce/gravy. They could have just poured in an adequate amount and thrown away the rest.

My girl wanted the fried pek koi or rice cakes (RM4.00)…

…that looked very different when she had it before that time when the fat chef was still around. Well, both of them said what they ordered were nice so I guess that was all that mattered.

I did try a bit of the pek koi but I thought there was way too much msg in it for my liking. It took a long time coming and in the meantime, I had finished my bihun…and I felt like going to answer nature’s call so I made my way to the washroom. It was not exactly clean, kind of wet and there was a lot of paper in the toilet bowl. When I was done, I flushed and the water came up like it was not going to stop…and I quickly made a run for it. I did not stay to see whether it overflowed or not. Then, I noticed that the guy doing the cooking was stationed in the area right in front of the toilets – he did not look like he was Chinese, kind of dark in complexion but that was perfectly all right by me as long as he could cook well. What put me off was that he had a cigarette in his mouth the whole time he was cooking…and I made up my mind there and then that I would never go back there again or if ever I do so, I would not order anything from that particular stall.

For dinner that evening, I decided to cook two of the boxes of goodies…

…that I got from my ex-student, Raphael, when he was home from the US.

I followed the instructions faithfully and when it was done, the potatoes looked like this…

…but it was still creamy inside…

We thought it tasted very nice but it was rather salty.

Personally, albeit it being over-salty, I liked the taste of the sauce more than what was in the pasta…

…but my girl loved the pasta so very much. In fact, by the time we all had our fill, there was only a little left so I said that we would just throw it away but she would not hear of it. She kept all of what was left, microwaved it the next morning and had it for breakfast. She said that the taste, the smell, everything reminded her of what she used to have in Wellington, New Zealand and she misses everything there so much. Perhaps one of these days, we can go there again on a holiday…