Opposite side…

Tomorrow is a public holiday here, Sarawak’s Independence Day, so my girl will be coming home earlier for the weekend. I guess many will be coming back as well seeing that tomorrow, the Borneo Cultural Festival 2016 will begin and some of the SUKMA 2016 events will be held here – Sarawak is the host this time around. I hear the hotels in the town centre are fully booked so I would expect massive jams over the next few days.

Well, if any of you are thinking of dropping by here…

…for the old lady’s kampua mee, I have not very good news for you. She has decided to call it a day once again and will not be selling the noodles at that coffee shop any longer.

As a matter of fact, that section of the coffee shop and restaurant has closed down…

What I heard was that the landlord wanted to raise the rent so everybody shifted to the opposite side…

That Sunday, we wanted to drop by here for the beef noodles but it was so very crowded, the people were literally spilling onto the road so we decided to come here instead. Unfortunately, the chu char place at the back of the shop was closed – I was told that they do not open on Sunday mornings so we had no choice but to order from the kampua stall…

…in front. Somebody told me that one of the ladies was working for the old lady formerly, helping her out at her stall and now that the latter has retired, she has taken over doing what she used to do and selling the same things, more or less.

I ordered one big bowl of the meatball soup (RM5.20)…

…to share…and that got me wondering about the price. They could have reduced the number of meatballs and charged RM5.00 instead and that might help a bit in giving the impression that it was not all that pricey.

No, it was not as thick and rich, the bone stock used for the soup, as the old lady’s. However, I would say it was nice and they did give us some of our traditional Foochow red wine to add to it. That sure helped enhance the taste…

…a lot and yes, we did enjoy it though my vote would go to what we had here before.

Yes, we had the kampua mee…

…too but no, it was not quite the same as the old lady’s.

It had the same stewed/braised meat topping instead of the boiled red-coloured char siew wannabe that one would find at a lot of places elsewhere around town and it had that very nice fragrance of lard and fried shallots. For one thing, it was lighter as far as the amount of msg used went and we liked that but I hear that it did not go down too well with many of the old lady’s loyal supporters. However, I did feel that the noodles were a little over-boiled/cooked and were softer, not as firm. All in all, I would say it was all right…

– just that to me, the old lady’s has a slight edge over it.

I wouldn’t mind dropping by again for these should I happen to be around the neighbourhood but that morning, I was quite put off by the fact that even though there wasn’t really a crowd, we had to wait for a mighty long time despite the fact that there were three ladies and one young boy helping out as well. Maybe she was a newbie at this thing so she was not all that good at it yet – hopefully, in time, she will be better and her customers would not need to wait…like forever, to be served!