This place, located at The Orchid Hotel along Brooke Drive (2.292906, 111.828398), has been open for business for quite a while now but only recently did they manage to get a true-blue Thai chef from Thailand and there has been no turning back since. Now that they are going full swing, Mary hosted a party on Tuesday night and invited all her friends to the official opening. If you have missed my previous posts on it, you can click the links here, here and here to see what I had had here before and enjoyed a lot, to say the least.
Mary, our perfect hostess, was dressed up to the nines that evening in her stunning black outfit and she went through the trouble of elaborately decorating the place too with candles…
…real flowers and tablecloth on every table…
…and so on and so forth, right down to the presentation of the fruits at the buffet tables…
…both inside and outside.
Ooopsss!!! There I was, caught unaware on camera…
*Andy Tie’s photo on Facebook*
Can you spot me in the snapshot? Hehehehehe!!!!
There was this little bowl of ikan bilis from Sandakan…
…to keep the early birds busy while waiting for everybody else to arrive and in the very impressive buffet spread that night were these irresistable Thai salads, the mango salad…
…the som tam (green papaya salad)…
…and this very nice one that I had not had before…
…with all the prawns and sotong (squid) and a choice between bihun (rice vermicelli) and noodles (the instant noodles variety) in it. I feasted on these so much that I had very little tummy space left for everything else but there was fried bihun as well…
…and chicken too, done in two different styles, but the photographs I took came out a little blurry so I would not be able to feature those in this post. Another time perhaps.
There was also this fried fish with Thai sauce…
…and the shrimp sashimi…
…that I had before on one of my earlier visits…and I absolutely loved that dish of minced meat with all the herbs and leaves…
…that was so fragrant I could detect it from where I was sitting when they brought it out of the kitchen. As a matter of fact, I enjoyed it so much that I went back for more!
By the time this dish of sotong (squid) and prawns…
…was served, I was already too full so I did not have any but I heard everyone at my table singing its praises. I am not sure if it was the same as the slipper lobster/crayfish dish that I had during my first visit to this place but it sure looked similar.
Initially, I thought these…
…were nougats (blame it on my failing eyesight, this old man) so I did not take any as I am not a fan of those and then I heard some of those at my table saying that it wasn’t nice, that it was sweet but they told me it wasn’t nougat – some kind of egg thing so I took one and tried. Gee!!! I loved it! Yes, it was sweet, great as a dessert. Probably everybody thought it was meant to be another one of the many options in the buffet spread and expected it to be salty or savoury. I asked Mary and she said it was pumpkin and egg custard – it actually reminded me of some kind of nyonya kueh and I have a soft spot for those, of course…and no prize for guessing how many I had. LOL!!!
It certainly was a most delightful evening with a truly awesome dinner, thank you, Mary, for the kind invitation. Our heartiest congratulations to you once again and here’s wishing you nothing but the very very best in all that lie ahead. Cheers!!!
...STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS! 