All in a row…

If you ever drop by Sibu, you will not fail to notice how many coffee shops there are in this town.

At the other end of the block, where you can find this one…

…in the vicinity of Sungai Merah here, is this one that I have blogged about not too long ago and there is this one at the end of the block to the left with the covered area in between the two where tables are laid out and customers are able to sit there too if they choose to do so…and then, there is an outlet of our own Sarawak chicken rice franchise too somewhere in the middle of that block and another coffee shop at the other end…and don’t forget, there is this one back to back with the first one I mentioned earlier and yes, there are more in the other blocks of shops all around that same area.

I have been here before a long time ago, so long that I can’t remember whether I blogged about it or not…but it so happened that my ex-student from my English Language tuition class shared this photograph of her plate of prawn noodles…

…on her Facebook page and initially, I thought she cooked that herself but she said, “It’s from a shop at Sg. Merah, just right across from the Catholic Church.” At that point in time, I thought it was this one but she added, “Not sure what’s the name of the shop. They’ve two corner shops joined. Mostly Malay stalls but this dish is from a Chinese stall at the back.” I had no idea at that point in time which shop she was talking about and as a matter of fact, it was only after we had left the place that morning did it dawn on me that this was the one! Good grief!!! LOL!!!

I saw the photographs of the prawn noodles at the stall and I did ask the guy how much one plate would cost and he said RM30.00…and no, of course, I did not order that. My missus requested for the tan hua mian (egg flower noodles) from him (RM5.00)…

…and I must say I was impressed by the amount of ingredients in the dish…

There were bits of liver, intestines, prawns, fish balls, meat and so on and my missus said that it was very nice and had that very much coveted wok hei fragrance. However, she said that the sauce/gravy was tomato and it would probably be nicer if it had been kway teow (flat rice noodles) instead.

In Kuching, you do find noodles served with tomato gravy like this but they deep-fry the finer noodles first – if I am not mistaken, they use the ones in their kolo mee – till nice and crispy and then, they would cook the gravy and pour it all over it, pretty much the same way they cooked the Cantonese fried noodles at one place that I used to frequent in PJ Old Town but they did not have tomato in their egg gravy.

I decided to have something from the Malay stall…

…in front. It sure seemed mighty popular and I thought the dishes they had for their nasi campur (mixed rice) looked good. Perhaps I would drop by for that one of these days.

I had their nasi lemak special (RM5.00)…

…and yes, I thought the rice was slightly better than what I had here but was not as nice as my slightly more expensive favourite in town – I wouldn’t say that one was the best I have ever had but comparatively, I find it better than all the rest around here. I did like that salted fish though but the egg was over-fried and usually with nasi lemak, they would serve the egg hard-boiled, just half of it to the most though.

The coffee was good and yes, I would think we would be back again and most likely, the next time around, I would order something from the noodles stall at the back.