I loved you once…

This used to be our favourite…

…when it came to kampua noodles here in Sibu. In fact, I held it in such high esteem that when my blogger friends came over for a visit sometime ago, I even brought them here. It was already very popular then and the crowd that you could see eating there would be testament to the fact.

I did hear some ex-colleagues saying that they would never go there to eat as the lady boss had waist-length hair and it might get into the food. That, of course, was absolutely nonsense. We ate there so often and we never did see a single strand of hair in the noodles. As a matter of fact, she hardly ever did the cooking herself; she had a couple of Foochow-speaking Indonesian helpers and they could do it really well so she left everything to them. We did not mind, of course, until those girls left and she had some new ones and we did not like what they dished out so we stopped going.

It seems that the husband does all the cooking these days assisted by some Indonesian helpers…

…and yes, they do it well and the place would be as crowded as ever all the time unlike the other coffee shop that I went to the other day at the end of that very same block of shops.

However, I don’t know if business was too good or what but the guy seemed to get my orders messed up more than once. I went and tapao-ed home some pian sip kampua mee once and when I got home, I found that there was only pian sip, no mee.

The other morning when I dropped by for breakfast, I asked for pian sip kampua again but I got what-we-call-mee pok instead…

…It did not really matter as our mee pok is actually the same as kampua mee, except that it is flat and if you are wondering why I always ordered piansip…

…our version of the wanton (meat dumplings), it’s just that I would rather have those than the few very thin slices of boiled meat, coloured red to make it look like char siew which it most definitely isn’t though I am quite positive that I used to get more, not just three…

…For one thing, the price here has gone up to RM3.20 a plate while elsewhere, one can easily get some decently good kampua mee for RM2.50-3.00 or less.

Yes, it is still very nice like before but at that price, I think I would much sooner go elsewhere even though it sure does not stop all the people, their regular customers probably, from coming every day.

SOON HOCK CAFE & RESTAURANT (2.312434, 111.845917) is located in the Delta Mall, Jalan Pedada area of shops, facing the church along Lorong Taman Seduan 8, off Jalan Gambir.