Anyway, the outlet is operated by Chinese nationals from China, and they serve Dongbei 东北 or Northeast China specialties, which I am really not familiar with at all. The lady who served us made it clear that Dongbei cuisine is distinctive. I could also tell from the pride in her voice that she had high regards of the food from her homeland. Unfortunately, I found the food to taste foreign to my palate. Lol.
Actually, when I walked into the outlet, I felt like I was in China. The outlet exuded that kind of feeling as decor was sparse and quite inelegant. You can see shoe racks at every table, but those are not for you to put your shoes. The shoe racks are used in place of the usual kitchen carts to place plates of steamboat ingredients. I thought it was quite ingenious of them to think of that, cause I would never have thought of using shoe racks to place my food! Lol.
Shoe rack steamboat ... Lol ...
The menu, similarly, seemed like a joke. Lol.
B3, for example, should be Special Sauce Pork Knuckle and B5 should be Special Fragrant Sauce Phoenix Claws. Lol. Since when could joss sticks be eaten. And many black patches on the menu indicate unavailability of the food items.
Well, we finally decided to try 2 types of dumplings - the pork and cabbage, and the pork and pickled cabbage.
A dumpling
Take a bite and look inside ...
The dumplings tasted decent, I suppose. It had minced pork and the cabbage provided the crunch. Plus, it was not too dry. But fit for Kings and Queens, I doubt-lah. Of the two types of dumplings, I prefer the pork and cabbage ones. The dumplings were supposed to be eaten with a vinegary garlic condiment, which I stayed away from cause the pungent smell was just too overpowering.
Garlic sauce
Next we ordered steamboat. It's RM60.00 for 5 of us, and we get 2 types of vegetables - napa cabbage and crinkly mustard leaves, 2 types of mushrooms - oyster and enoki, 2 types of tofu - soft sofu and tofu pok, and 3 types of fish/meat balls. Pretty pathetic, if you ask me.
We opted for the clear broth
Clear broth coming to a boil
To me, the broth had a smoky flavour, which I did not quite like. The after taste was not very pleasant in my mouth.
The thing which we TBT was the steamboat condiment - its look, its colour , its presentation seemed off-putting.
Doesn't it remind you of .... err ... fecal matter? Or in Hokkien, KNS!! LOL :))))
Anyway, it was actually some sort of fermented bean paste for dipping our steamboat ingredients. It's just that we were not so keen to dip into it. Hehe.
We ordered plum juice to go with our meal, and that too, did not suit our taste buds. The whole meal cost us RM91.00, which was to me, very expensive for the kind of food that we get. And no offence, but this would be my first and last visit to this outlet.
Oh, by the way, TBT = Tak Boleh Tahan.
No comments:
Post a Comment