The same but different…

We have not dropped by here…

…for a very long time – it is different now as it is no longer air-conditioned and has switched to the regular coffee shop kind of setting.

I was distracted for a while by the lady’s t-shirt…

…that day when my missus and I dropped by for lunch. No, I do not know all the songs but I would say that I know most of them except for a couple. How many do you know?

My missus had their mee mamak (RM5.00)…

…which was fried with curry powder…

I don’t think I’ve ever seen mee mamak done this way elsewhere before but then again, we have places here where they fry bihun with curry powder and they call it Singapore bihun. I am pretty sure they do not have that in the island republic, much less cook bihun this way. Nonetheless, my missus enjoyed it very much and insisted that it was nicer than all that she had before at the Malay shops and elsewhere.

I loved their Mongolian chicken with rice (RM6.50)…

…which was still good but I do recall that the gravy used to be thicker…

…with a strong peanut fragrance, something like satay sauce but not quite the same.

For one thing, I would give them top marks for their chili dip…

…that was so very very nice and very spicy and they give that to you in a bottle at your table – you can have all you want and we sure helped ourselves to a whole lot of it.

A couple of days later, over the weekend when my girl was already home for the week-long school holidays, we went here again for lunch because I wanted to try their stout pork (RM13.00)…

For one thing, it is very convenient for us as our house is just round the corner. As for the pork, yes, I would say it was to our liking.

I did not think the Thai-style tofu (RM8.00)…

…was anything special though – my girl wanted that and I also ordered their salted vegetable tofu soup (RM8.00)…

…which had a whole lot of ingredients inside and it tasted great though we would very much prefer the simplicity of the one here, more like what one would cook at home and I would prefer it more if they had used regular soft tofu instead of those cylindrical Japanese egg ones.

We also had their salted fish brinjal (RM8.00)…

My girl loves brinjal and no matter how it is done, she is sure to like it! The food warmer that they used to serve it in caught me eye – very nice…

…and it seemed that they used it to serve some of their other dishes too.

On the whole, lunch was all right, nothing sensational, not anything to sweep us off our feet but it certainly was so very cheap and the servings were all so huge that we had to tapao a whole lot of the food home. I think for the three of us, one meat dish and one veg would be more than enough.

MY CHEF RESTAURANT (2.311365, 111.846638) is located along Jalan Pedada in the block of shops to the left of Delta Mall, the second one in that block if you are coming from that direction, with the Astro Sibu office at the other end of that same block.