The people next door…

Everytime we had dinner here, I was intrigued by the crowd at the coffee shop next door. Is the food so nice? Is it cheap? Those were the questions that went through my mind. However, we never got round to going there to try until one rainy Sunday night but the place was packed and I could not find a parking space close by so we ended up some place else. Finally, that night, at long last, we managed to go there for dinner.

When I went there for the very nice mee sua twice, I had seen the photographs on display…

…at the chu-char (cook & fry) place at the back and one that caught my attention was their crispy pata or what we call the Philippine pork leg…

…Seeing that there were only the three of us, the lady who came to take our order suggested half of it only for RM28.00. Wowwwww!!! I thought the price was kind of steep but never mind! I had not had it for a long time and I would like to see if the one here would be worth coming back for. Well, unfortunately, it was at best, just o.k. and not really to my liking – I thought it was on the dry side and a bit too hard.

The bitter gourd with three types of egg…

…had too little bitter gourd and a whole lot of egg. This too was all right and I do think that there is a fair number of places that can do it better.

Thankfully, the Foochow tofu with canned oysters…

…was very much to our liking. No, we did not think it was all that authentic but whatever went into it sure brought it to a whole new level. I think I could taste a bit of the traditional Foochow red wine in it and yes, we enjoyed it a lot.

I cannot remember exactly now but even with the pork leg, the total, inclusive of three plates of rice, came up to over RM40 only, a little cheaper than the places we frequent more regularly but then again, this is just a stall at the back of a coffee shop, not a small air-conditioned and a lot more comfortable restaurant.

Yes, there were a lot of people there too that night and the dishes they were having did look rather nice – perhaps we did not order the right dishes…but frankly, I’m not too sure whether we will go back there again especially when I was wishing the whole time I was there that they would not use those plastic and melamine plates and bowls for serving hot foods.

NEW HEE’S FOOD CORNER (2.311365, 111.846638) is located along Jalan Pedada, now Jalan Dr Wong Soon Kai, the very first one in the block of shops to the left of the Delta Mall, with the Astro Sibu office at the other end of that same block.