"Claws dripping with creamy gravy..."
Even though there's plenty of seafood joints in PJ, we tend to go to the same place over and over again. We listed
five of them here and one of it is PJ Seafood Restaurant. I chose to skip my usual trip to
Fatty Crab and decided to try it out for a change.
We got there just in time for dinner. Rows of fresh seafood were displayed around the restaurant so you can pick and choose what you want to eat. Due to its popularity we decided to order the famous Claypot Butter Crabs. Along with the crabs, we also tried the sambal sotong and a stir-fry vegetable dish.
The crabs arrived at our plate steaming hot, the creamy gravy practically dripping from their claws. There was an offer on the crabs, you get 3 crabs for RM50 which is definitely a good bargain. Hammers in hand, we tucked into the dish immediately. Because of the saltiness of the gravy, we asked for rice instead of mantou buns. The milky gravy soaks into the rice and infuse it with its buttery flavour.
I know it's called 'butter' crabs but in actual fact, the cook mix margarine and milk to make the yummy gravy. They cook until it thickens into a sticky consistency. It's almost like a roux minus the flour. The crabs were Indonesian mud crabs - sweet and tasty. It goes so well with the cheesy creaminess of the dish. They use the claypot to allow all the flavours to be sealed in. This is the star dish at PJ Seafood so it's must-order item here.
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"they even use vegetarian belacan..."
Vegetarians get the short end of the stick when it comes to dining out in Malaysia. Things get even more complicated when they're dining with a non-vegetarian friend. With a limited choice of places, vegetarians are usually confined to the salad section of the menu while their fellow diners get to indulge in meatier (and yummier) choices. Fortunately, we found a place in Cheras where vegetarians and non-vegetarians can dine happily together. Tian Yian Cafe is a vegetarian restaurant that has been around for years. Offering more than 100 dishes, you're bound to find something you like here.
We first tried the Hong Siew noodles. The 'meat' is braised in dark soy sauce, pepper, ginger and garlic. This gives it a smoky flavour and adds more depth to the dish. The broth is wholesome and garnished with an array of vegetables like bak choy and carrots. It is a satisfying dish and we were pretty full when we finished the bowl.
But of course, as always, I couldn't resist the nasi lemak. It was actually impressive. It had plenty of 'lemak' and the sambal squid was really tasty. The squid was obviously not the real thing but incredibly I couldn't tell the difference. The texture and taste was spot on. The sambal even had hints of 'belacan'. When I asked them about the vegetarian belacan, they told me that it was made from a mix of soybean and mushrooms. It's amazing how 'shrimpy' it tasted.
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"34 ways to cook your crabs...."
If you're a fan of steaming hot fresh crabs this is one spot you'll want to try out. For starters they have 34 ways in which they prepare crab. When I think of the menu I somehow get Bubba's voice from Forrest Gump listing out the variety of crab dishes. You can have chill crab, salted egg crab, marmite crab, curry crab, cheese crab, clay pot crab....I'm sure you get the point.
I decided to order two of the most popular cooking styles; their signature butter crab and my personal favourite the kam heong crab. The butter crab is pretty famous here. It's cooked in a creamy and rich sauce giving a slight butteriness to the crab. This comes with mantou buns(steamed or fried) which you can dip into the sauce while enjoying the sweet flesh. This is quite heavy on its own so if you're in a small group I'd recommend just having this with the buns and maybe a veggie on the side.
To be honest though, the kam heong is what I come here for. Kam heong literally translates to "Golden Fragrant" from the Cantonese dialect. This dish has a mix of Chinese, Indian and Malay flavours as it uses a combination of dried shrimp, chilli, curry powder and curry leaves. This is extremely aromatic and tasty and will have you sucking on the shells and your fingers for more.
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"nostalgic and tasty...."
There are a few restaurants that hold a special place in your heart. The ones you went on your first ever date, the ones you first sneaked out of school for, the ones that you saved up money to go to – because it was out of your price range enough to make it a special treat, but cheap enough to mean you could pay for it yourself as a broke schoolgirl. For me, Strawberry Fields is a place few other restaurants can hold a nostalgic candle up to (and the food’s pretty good too!)
What was that thing Anthony Bourdain said? If the menu has over 100 things on it, there’s no way it can be good? Something like that. While our favourite neighbourhood cafe isn’t exactly haute cuisine, it does a pretty excellent job at keeping the bellies of PJ folks full as it’s been doing for years. Looking pretty much the same since I first started going there as a pudgy schoolgirl more than 10 years ago, it occupies a sweet piece of real estate in New Town that many would clamour to hold on to for that long. In recent years, they’ve even acquired the lot across the walkway from it, essentially making the restaurant twice as big.
Back to the aforementioned menu: this thing really does have over 100 items on it. There’s a small selection of different nasi lemak, a couple of pages of Asian noodle and rice dishes, a whole section of Western offerings, snacks and nibbles, and a long list of drinks. I’ve rarely been disappointed with anything I order here, as their portions are generous and the taste almost always hits the spot. This has led to menu exploring; most times my friends and I come here, we challenge each other to try something new on the menu we haven’t tried before. You know, just to see if it’s good. And that’s what we did the other day, on our (probably) 256th visit to our favourite cafe. A few random jabs at the menu, and we sat back and waited patiently.
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"Ask for the killer 'secret' sambal...."
Chanai & Chaya is one of the few places in the whole of Klang Valley where I will absolutely order their apoms. They make it plain and simple. Just in case you have not already known,
the TTDI market was scheduled to be demolished to make way for 'development' with no plans to relocate the sellers into a new place. It's such a shame that one of the best managed markets in Malaysia with the choicest ingredients had to go in this manner and we are all to blame if we don't do anything about this. Just in case we lose this market entirely, I wanted to record a piece of history before all this fades away.
So here's your apom guys! An indian apom is fermented rice flour cooked over a hot small wok. One expert batter pour later, the wok is covered with a small lid so that the heat from the steam cooks the thick middle layer but leaving it moist and juicy whilst the wok crisps the sides like a sweet cracker.
Aunty Padama makes this perfectly everytime. Her mom helps sometime when things get busy. Perfection on a plate. Apoms like this has a companion. Sweet coconut milk, slightly diluted so that it does not become too creamy. I like. It's such a simple dish with the simplest ingredients but every chef or cook that is worth their salt will attest that it's the simplest recipes that are the hardest to make well. C&C's version is light, slightly soury, no rice flour residue and comes with 27 years of experience.
Most people ferment the batter overnight but at C&C, they actually start batter fermentation at 4am. Perhaps they have a very good yeast catalyst or my best bet is that they put some of the previous day batter into the new one.
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"Prawns with yummy buttery floss...."
The star dish at Ewa is the steamed fish. All the ingredients are sourced locally and they only start cooking when they get your order so your dishes are freshly cooked on site in the open kitchen.The tilapia is steamed in a soy-based gravy, abundant with garlic, ginger and spring onions. The steaming process tenderizes the fish so the meat dissolves in your mouth effortlessly. They garnish the fish with minced garlic adding a sweet aromatic tone to the dish.
Flavours are subtle and it was quite satisfying but I can't help noticing the lack of vinegar. Chinese cooking wine is usually used to add some vinegary tones in the dish. Because this is a halal establishment, they had to omit the wine and the dish loses some of the sourish notes you associate with Chinese styled steamed fish. Even without the wine, this is a pretty decent dish so definitely give it a try if you get a chance to come here.
When I asked them why they use tilapia instead of the usual garoupa or tongsan, En. Kamarul who manages the restaurant with his brother explained the reason. " Not a lot of Malays like to eat tilapia because it's a freshwater fish and the taste could be quite bland. I wanted to change their perception. Actually, if you cook it the right way, the fish can absorb flavours easily. The flesh is soft and it's so popular overseas that it's a shame that we don't like to eat it more."
The next item we tried was the butter prawns. The plate was so full of buttery floss that you could hardly see the prawns! The prawns were fresh, sweet and succulently tasty. They were some slightly burnt bits of floss on the bottom of the plate, at first I was a bit miffed but as soon as I gave it a try my opinion changed. The burnt bits actually gave extra crunchiness to the dish. This is actually much sweeter than the ones I usually try at Chinese restaurants. No complaints though because the plate was emptied in no time at all!
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"Biryani here is fieeerrcee..."
Fierce Curry House sits on a back street in Bangsar. Most people who would even know of this road are journalists who work in the newspaper offices nearby or people who have been driving in KL for a while. In actual fact, it’s literally a stone’s throw away from Jalan Bangsar – who knew a true culinary gem had been hiding there these past few months?
Herukh Jethwani, who used to work at Bangles (that old and fancy North Indian restaurant in town), now has his own place, a little shop his family took over from a chap fan place. The set-up is deceptively simple, as it looks just like any other mamak shop: foldable plastic chairs, buffet steam table, and open air, so the smell of curry and spices can reach the street and entice people in. And what you get when you go in, my friends, is one of the best Hyderabad biryanis in the Klang Valley.
Using almost 30 different spices (!), their biryanis are complex, exploding with flavour. Ingredients are assembled in little metal pots, sealed with plain capati dough and steamed for a few hours. Herukh points out that the dough helps keep the steam in, while providing an excellent marker as to when the contents in the pot are cooked: if the dough is cooked, then the biryani is cooked. Once it’s served to you, you then use your spoon or fork handle to pry off the dough and carefully open the top. Try, please, to not faint at the delicious scent of the steam.
We had the mutton biryani and the vegetarian biryani that day, as Fridays are their special biryani days, serving all four of their biryanis (the aforementioned along with chicken and fish). The mutton biryani was chock full of tender chunks of meat – these guys sure are generous! It’s also boneless, meaning that you don’t get that nasty surprise of chipping your tooth on a shard of bone as you do in a lot of other places. Flavour-wise it’s intense. There’s a hum of onions, the hit of herbs and spices, and the meat is actually sweet. This is because they get their meat delivered every day (their supplier is about 20 steps away from the shop) and everything is fresh, fresh, fresh.
What steals the show for us is their vegetarian biryani. As soon as we take a spoonful, our eyes go wide, sighs of delight take over the table and we silently shovel the rice and vegetables into our mouths. Carrots, cauliflowers, what looks like beans (at this point we don’t really care and trust Herukh with our lives), all mixed up in a mélange of equally complex but completely different combination of spices as the ones in the mutton biryani. The flavours in this one are a little more assertive, brighter, showing us that they don’t use a one-spice-mix-for-all approach. In fact, they’re so concerned about their biryanis that the biryani preparation gets its own kitchen!
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"Sambal is sweet, almost like chocolate...."
One Sunday morning I found myself queueing up at a stall in front of a hospital in Seksyen 20 Shah Alam for nasi lemak. The stall's name is Nasi Lemak Pak Ayob, and it’s quite well known as the few nasi lemak stalls where you have to queue for your food.
Nasi Lemak Pak Ayob started their business at the Seksyen 6 pasar, and as customers flocked beneath its small roof, they saw fit to expand their stalls to other locations. Now they have two other stalls at Seksyen 20; one inside a mamak shop, and the other here, beside the road in front of KPJ Selangor Medical Center. I’ve heard there was another location in Seksyen 13 (or was it 10?) but couldn’t verify.
I guess one of the biggest indicators of success in food and beverage operations is whether or not you manage to open one or more locations, regardless of what type of joint you are: - stall, café, restaurant and so on. I think a lot of food sellers and owners would love the enviable problem of supply trying hard to keep up with demand.
They only open during the morning, as I unfortunately found out the night before, and you have to be quick as they run out pretty fast.
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"famous in Shah Alam...."
A confession: I have only ever had chicken rice of the Hainanese type. The one with soup, soy sauce and chili on the side, and a portion of steamed or roasted chicken on the side. So the chicken rice at Nasi Ayam Pak Mal was a new thing for me (forgive me for sounding a bit naïve this time!).But in hindsight, maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised. After all, one dish can have so many interpretations depending on where you go and who’s making it, right? Just take a look at nasi lemak, or mee goreng, or char kuey teow (though, for the record, I refuse to aknowledge the ‘wet’ version of char kuey teow as ‘char kuey teow) and various other local dishes.
There were plenty of people at the Seksyen 11 location, but thankfully seats were easy to come by. Apparently, they’ve been in business for over 30 years, and the place is very well known among Shah Alam-ians. That must be some sort of testament to their nasi ayam, so it was high time I checked it out. The menu is pretty simple. Aside from nasi ayam, they had soto and some noodle dishes.
So it was at Nasi Ayam Pak Mal in Shah Alam. This nondescript stall, located at the Seksyen 11 foodcourt near the Dewan Serbaguna, seemed at first to be like any other nasi ayam stall in Shah Alam. I was told they cook all their food at Seksyen 10, a stones throw away, where they also have another stall.
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"Let's get sloppy..."
When the fast food craving strikes, nothing will curb it quicker than a greasy roadside burger. Once you've given in to the call of processed food, why don't go all the way and tuck into the messiest burger available in KL? When it comes to burgers, Om's are the sloppiest burgers you can find and they're still going strong after 27 years of being in the business. If you don't mind your patties fried in a pool of oil, drenched in margarine and topped with generous amounts of mayo and sauces, then Om is your place. Humble and unpretentious, Om Burger is an ideal supper option if you're looking for a late night grease fest. Just don't tell your doctor or he'll ask you to go for a heart check up. Sinful and loaded with margarine, you know that it's bad for you but it is so delicious that sometimes it's just really hard to resist.
They have fans as far as Singapore so there must be more to their burgers than just a whole amount of grease. A customer even bought 50 Om Burgers to bring to his son who was studying in Bandung! This just shows how famous these burgers are. The friendly 'Om' (which literally means 'uncle' in Indonesian) is the master griller. He helms the grill until 3 am and then his son will take over. The stall is a favourite among denizens of the night because it opens from 8 pm till 5 am every day. You can see how popular these burgers are from the stacks of patties and hot dogs on the side of the grill, ready to be made into burgers for eager customers.
You can't get more decadent than their burger 'Special'. First they crack an egg, spread it out on the grill like a really flat omelette before adding a slice of cheese and finishing it off with the burger patty on top. This grease soaked combo then goes to the final assembly stage where the patty goes on top of a bun with huge squirts of mayo, sauces, a sprinkle of shredded cabbage and then it's wrapped up in paper ready for you to 'tapau'.
Surprisingly their hot dogs are gaining more popularity compared to their burgers. Bigger and longer than most of the other burger stalls in KL, the hot dogs are filled with cheese so when you take a bite it oozes out filling your mouth with salty cheesy creaminess.
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