Passing by…

This chicken rice place…

…has been around for a very long time – I heard that it is the branch of the immensely popular one in town (2.291822, 111.827655) that is always so very packed with customers spilling onto the road, so to speak. They do have quite a bit of business here too…

…but I had never stopped by any of the two before, not even once.

Well, that day, I passed by the shop – I was going to the bakery a few doors away in that same block of shops. This was sometime ago when the ladies were out of town so I was alone, living the life of a single bachelor, and my initial plan was to grab a chicken pie for my lunch. Yes, there were a lot – two trays, in fact…on the shelves which meant that those were booked by someone, not available for sale. In the end, I decided to just go for some chicken rice at the aforementioned place and be done with it.

I had the roast chicken drumstick…

…with the rice (RM4.80 altogether)…

It was o.k. – after all, roast chicken is…roast chicken. I guess one can’t be much different from another and as for the rice, I thought it was just so-so, definitely not the best in town but also not the worst.

I also ordered this meat platter (RM5.00)…

…of char siew (barbecued pork) and siew yoke (roast pork). The latter was very nice with a strong fragrance of garlic and pepper that gave it an edge over some of the others elsewhere. The char siew, however, was rather disappointing but generally, I do feel that we can’t get really good char siew here or there is none around  that I’ve ever encountered that has swept me off my feet. So far, one of the few and far between that I quite like would be the one here…

The complimentary soup was good…

– a whole lot nicer than those so terribly watered-down versions (salted vegetable with a chicken claw in it) at many places around here that would taste almost like plain water.

I would not go out of my way for this but I wouldn’t mind dropping by, like that day, when it so happened that I was in the vicinity and felt like having chicken rice.

SIBU CHICKEN RICE COFFEE SHOP (2.310958, 111.831458), Dewan Suarah branch, is located along Jalan Dewan Suarah, on your right as you are entering from Jalan Melur, in the same block of shops as Aroma Bakery.