Tell me where…

A friend of mine posted on Facebook a photograph of what looked like lor mee to me (blame my ancient handphone for that – the photos are small and you can’t enlarge) and it sure looked very good but she said it was mee jawa. Never mind! It certainly appeared yummy enough for me to want to go and check it out so I asked her to tell me where she had that. She responded very promptly that she could not remember the name of the shop and it was opposite the government offices.

Hmmmm…that was kind of vague especially when there are lots of government offices scattered over different parts of town but I could jolly well guess that she was referring to the Federal Complex and I did recall there were some Malay coffee shops in the area right across the road facing the so-called Lovers’ Bridge…

…and yes, there was one, this one (2.324460, 111.839981)…

According to the guy, I assumed he was the owner, he was originally from Kelantan but has been here for many years now. I asked if he was in the army, retired and he said yes. Obviously there are those who came and never want to go back and they probably got married to the locals. We do have quite a few of them around like this one here who is a retired teacher, also originally from West Malaysia, and he too has stayed back and gone into the food business.

For once, the coffee…

…was quite good. Generally, what you will get at the Malay coffee shops would be very very sweet, very diluted with hardly any coffee fragrance but I would say the one that I had here was pretty decent.

You can get some of the things they serve here at this stall…

…and they also do some cooking at the back – I did hear somebody ordering kampua goreng (fried kampua noodles) but I did not have that.

I had the mee jawa (RM4.50)…

…and it was somewhat different from what I would be more familiar with elsewhere with the pinkish orange sweet potato gravy – somehow, this one made me think of the mee rebus that I used to enjoy a lot when I was in Singapore, 1973…

There was a lot of beef in it and half an egg, chunks of tomato and some green vegetable, sawi…and all in all, I would say it was quite nice and though it may not get me rushing back for more, I wouldn’t mind having that again should I happen to drop by this shop another time.

My missus ordered the mee kolok (RM4.00)…

…and ordering that at a Malay stall is a big mistake. Even the Chinese stalls here, most if not all of them, cannot get it right…so let’s just say that she was not impressed.

I also tried their nasi lemak (RM4.50)…

…and it was good – no, not that wow, it is so very good kind of good but at least, the rice was not hard and dry with a very faint hint of lemak-ness (richness with santan/coconut milk) and I could detect the ginger and the fragrance of pandan (screwpine leaf) in it. The sambal was very nice and I liked the bits of salted fish that they gave by the side.

It was only around 10 something in the morning and I saw quite a number of people having the nasi campur there. The ulam or our Malaysian salad…

…was ready and it did look quite enticing and there were quite a few dishes…

…already available as well…

The pandan chicken…

…caught my eye and I liked how they put everything in a cabinet with wire mesh-covered sliding doors to keep out those pesky flies, not that I could spot any the whole time we were there, and if you look at the photograph of the noodle stall above, it seemed that they had the noodles ready in the bowls already and they went through the trouble of covering each one of them with a plate. Ain’t that nice, their efforts to be hygienic and clean?

I certainly would be back here again to give the nasi campur a try but not as early as 10 something in the morning, maybe a little later. LOL!!