What did you do…

Back to my West Malaysian friends from KL who were in town the other day, they were left to their own devices most of the time so I did not really know what mischief they were up to while they were gallivanting all over town.

From the posts that they shared on Facebook, it seemed that they were extremely fascinated by everything at the Sibu Central Market and they enjoyed some of the stuff that they tried at the hawker centre on the 1st floor and they seemed to have fallen head over heels in love with our Sibu Foochow dianpianngu, there at the hawker centre and also at the celebrated place of origin here and also here.

They had lunch here and dinner here and though they felt that some of the dishes were nice, they were not exactly overwhelmed by them. That was why I was wondering if I had made the right decision in insisting on bringing them here for lunch on their final day in town.

Nobody said anything about the pandan chicken…

…so I guess it was all right and I did not see anybody getting excited about the butter scotch prawn balls…

…the favourite of many here, either. It appeared to me that they were not all that fond of dishes that were sweet and I could jolly well guess that that was the reason.

We also had the grilled lamb with the very nice lime and mayo sauce…

– one dish that I do enjoy very much around here.

Somebody commented that the cangkuk manis fried with egg…

…was not as nice as one place that they went to on their first night in town (coming right up in my next post) but the rest were fine with it. I would agree to some extent that it was not as nice as before – the leaves, for one, were kind of old and I was somewhat put off by that and the eggs looked rather dull, like they had added some kind of sauce or whatever, not nice and yellow. Even my missus felt that same way the last time we were here.

They loved the midin, ching chao (fried plain with garlic)…

…though and personally, I did not think the fried mee sua…

…was all that great that day. One of the ladies does not eat pork so I had asked for the meat to be left out and perhaps, they did not use lard to cook either and probably, that made all the difference. I certainly had very much nicer fried mee sua here on some of my earlier visits.

They all loved the tauhu tear, the Foochow-style tofu soup cooked with canned oysters…

…and their own-made tofu…

…was a hit. They said it tasted so good, with its light hint of hay bee (dried prawns) and it was nice enough on its own, no need for any mayo or sauce.

Well, at least, there were hits and misses so on the whole, it wasn’t too bad, after all. The total for the food for the 8 0f us came up to RM195.00, including one dish of Foochow fried noodles that I did not order and I asked for it to be packed for me to take home and no, if it is Foochow fried noodles that you want, I would suggest that you go some place else – theirs isn’t the best around, that much I would say.

On their final night here, they went here for the super expensive prawn noodles (The last I heard, it was already RM45.00 a bowl – word had it that they had to fork out a whooping RM80 for that!!!) and their chao chai hung ngang (noodles in preserved vegetable fish soup which they actually liked more than the prawn mee) and here for the super super expensive empurau aka wang poo liao (unforgettable), steamed, before flying back the very next morning.

They came to Sibu with individual suitcases, all quite empty and after 4 days/3 nights, they went back to KL with all of them packed to the brim plus at least three extra styrofoam boxes filled with frozen fish and prawns and what not and their hand-carried luggage! They had to buy extra baggage for all that! And of course, they ate A LOT too while they were here but they did not manage to eat everything – too many things, too little time! Now, who says there is nothing in Sibu?

RUBY RESTAURANT  is located at No. 71, Jalan Kampung Nyabor right next to HOME COOK CORNER  (2.292756, 111.825335) with the AmBank Tunku Osman branch in the very next block.