I was hoping…

…that the claypot noodles (RM7.00)…

…from this stall…

…at this coffee shop/food court would be something worth having but unfortunately, it did not sweep me off my feet. At best, I would say it was all right but it turned out to be as unimpressive as the stall itself – no nice glossy photographs of what was available, just a very brief list of the things the lady was selling.

So why did I go and order the claypot mee then, you may ask? Well, sometime ago, a friend of mine had that but at another coffee shop, not this one and I had been wanting to go and give it a try all this while. I can recall some of the very nice ones that I had around town long ago but I had not seen any at those places that I had been to lately. I was thinking that perhaps it had died a natural death and no one was selling that anymore.

Well, I happened to be in the vicinity that morning and I decided to walk around to see how everything was since I had not been there for a long while now. The Penang char kway teow stall was not there anymore and the Bintangor lady’s popiah stall had gone missing in action for a long time now. The chee cheong fun guy was around but I did not feel like having that and I settled for the claypot noodles…

…in the end.

Browsing through some old blogposts of mine, I discovered that I did have the claypot noodles…

…there once in 2016 (and it was only RM4.50 at the time) but it did not look quite the same and from what I wrote about it then, I was not impressed with it either. These were the words that I said then: It tasted all right though but with all the choices at this particular place, I probably would not be ordering that again.

Coming back to this present day and time, there was yee mee…

…in the one I had that morning. I remember some places would just use our local Sibu Foochow alkaline and smell-free light yellow noodles and I was hoping that would not be the case here. Somehow or other, I felt that only the ones with this yee mee would be what claypot noodles should be or in other words, the real thing!

There weren’t a lot of added ingredients, just some fried fish balls and green vegetables and one small piece of those imitation crabsticks that I never liked. There wasn’t any meat – no chicken, no pork and of course, for RM7.00, I was not expecting to find any prawns in it. I was wondering about those taugeh (bean sprouts) though – do they usually have those in claypot mee? Actually, in my opinion, if there had been some bits of Chinese cabbage, that would probably help enhance the taste a little.

There was an egg…

…at the bottom but because of the intense heat in the claypot, the yolk was no longer runny.

The overall taste was somewhat mild, a little on the bland side but I was glad that there wasn’t much msg in it, if there was any at all. The lady gave me a blue plastic bowl in case eating it straight from the claypot would be too hot for me to handle. Of course, I did not want to use that!!! No way!!!

While I was there, I saw the lady serving a bowl of mee sua to a customer at another table and it looked quite good. I guess I would not come back for this but I sure wouldn’t mind giving her mee sua a try if I happen to be around this part of the woods again.

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.