No wonder we cannot find it easily here in Sibu. Chee cheong fun (猪肠粉), a rice noodle roll, is a Cantonese dish from Guangdong Province in southern China and Hong Kong, commonly served either as a snack, a small meal or as a variety of dim sum and Sibu is a predominantly-Foochow town.
We can get it in the morning at this restaurant here among all the dim sum selections that they serve and way back in 2016, we could get it here. If I remember correctly, the guy was from West Malaysia, probably not a Foochow. Unfortunately, it did not last too long and eventually, it called it a day. After that, we did not have any chee cheong fun stall anywhere, or not that I know of.
Well, it so happened that I was in the neighbourhood the other morning and I decided to drop by here…
I went around the whole place and I spotted this stall…
…and of course, I wanted to give it a try but I did not know which one to order…
From what the lady was telling me in Mandarin, the first one at the top (A) was prawn and the second one (C), char siew and I told her those two were the ones that I wanted.
This looked like (C) or maybe (B)…
…but there did not seem to be anything inside.
The other one…
…that I thought had prawn inside, had bits of char siew, of that I was pretty sure.
Whichever one they were, both were really very nice, nicer than those from the guy who was here before. The rice noodle roll was so thin, so fine and translucent, so silky smooth, almost like our pian sip (meat dumpling) skin and the sambal that came with it was so good it brought the taste to a whole new level. One bone to pick would be how they were not so generous with the sambal – the next time I drop by here for this, I certainly would ask for more!
I handed the lady a RM10.00 note and I was surprised when she gave me back RM2.00 change. Obviously what I had weren’t (A) and (C), most likely (A) and (B).
JIALI CAFE (2.292140, 111.841524) is located among the shops behind Medan Mall, Jalan Wong King Huo, a few doors away to the right of JUNCTION CAFE, facing the road leading to the Medan Hotel there.
...STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS! 