I’m not coming back…

My girl wanted the three-cup-wine chicken…

…that day so we dropped by here…

…for dinner. I guess that is the name of the restaurant – I do not read Mandarin – but this place has been around for so long that the sign in front is so very badly faded that whatever that is on it has almost turned completely invisible.

We used to come here quite frequently as the food was great…until I had a not very nice experience where we were served an expensive fish that was lor kor (kind of hard and rubbery) and I was so pissed off by it that I never wanted to come back again. We did go back again one more time though and yes, we all thought it was rather pricey eating here so that was the last time we went.

The chicken was nice but it was completely different from what we had before and we felt it was much nicer then. The ngor bee th’ng…

…I had was nice too but likewise, it was also different from before. The shaved ice stuck together in one clump like that, there was no barley and those white strips should be thinly sliced so they would not be so hard and so difficult to bite and chew. It certainly was nicer when I had that before.

We had the Four Heavenly Kings…

…and my girl did not want it fried with canned stewed pork so we had it ching chao (fried plain) and yes, it was all right, a little strong on the msg but it was quite bearable.

The so-called claypot tofu…

…was good except that it came in a mini-wok on a food warmer, not in a claypot but that was perfectly ok with us.

I saw the word satay on a whiteboard on the wall, among everything else that was in Mandarin, so I asked the young girl about it. Of course, she could only speak Mandarin but I could understand what she said – they only had pork or chicken, no beef or lamb and I ordered three sticks…

…to try. They were nice – my missus said they tasted like char siew and my girl said they were like bak kua (barbecued pork slices) but no, they did not give any peanut sauce or any kind of dip with it. You will just have to eat it as it is!

We used to want to come back here because of one dish – their prawns in a coconut…

…and since we had not had it for a few years now, I just had to order that. We sure enjoyed the gravy – it was very very nice but the prawns were hay kiew (prawn balls), supposedly cheaper than regular whole prawns and they were a bit hard, not entirely fresh, some of them, and that coconut sure looked like it had been recycled many many times so of course, there was no young coconut flesh in it unlike when we had this dish before.

I was kind of stunned when I went to pay the bill – the total, inclusive of two rice and drinks, came up to over RM100, RM104.00, if I remember correctly. I did not ask for a breakdown of the prices but I saw RM42.00 scribbled on the piece of paper, all in Mandarin, except for the prices and that was for the coconut prawns…and there was one RM15.00 which was for the satay which means that it was RM5.00 per stick. Good grief!

I don’t know if the place is now run by some other people now or what – I did not see the man, not a young one, who was always there before and I had the impression that he was the boss/owner…or perhaps they now have new people in the kitchen, not the crew before so even though they still serve the same dishes, the quality seems to have fallen short…and of course, when it was not quite satisfactory, nothing to shout about and obviously not as nice as before and with that kind of prices, I do not think I would be going back there again all that soon.

TUNG SENG RESTAURANT (2.303762, 111.849260) is located at No. 43, Lorong Pahlawan 9,  off Lorong Pahlawan 7B/3 in the Sibu Bus Terminal area on one end and Jalan Diong Kik on the other, in the same block of shops as the Curry House outlet there.