The better 3 dish meal

Two lanky white men walked into this crumbling dinner shack on stilts yesterday. I heard one of them say

" Geep mi yor besd " with a big grin, in all good intention. 

The local Mandarin speaking waiter shot him a blank look and started squirming about trying to look like he knew what he just said, without giving the game up.

The taukehsoh ( ladyboss) soon stepped in and asked 

in English 

" So what you want ? Cheeken ? Feeeshhh ? Where gee ? "

They nodded at all three and left the cooking all up to her.

Gee...no they shouldn't have left it to the ladyboss to recommend. Especially when they themselves eat spicy stuff and think you, would prefer less, um, stimulating dishes.

But let's forget those two for a moment and take a look at my meal first.

Butter prawn with slightly crisp egg batter , sugar granules and bayleaf. Tasty but a bit overdone . My biggest gripe is that the prawn was way too small for a dish like this and nobody in the kitchen had the courtesy to warn us beforehand.  

Kangkong belacan.

Water convolvulus fried with fermented shrimp paste.

Excellent Malay influenced dish incorporated into the local Chinese diet. In fact I dare say in our hands this has been tweaked to near perfection. We joked that in order for the belacan sauce to be this good, the maker of the belacan paste, must have flouted a dozen health and hygiene rules . Or be on the run and shift premises often in order not to be detected by the authorities. It's not illegal stuff, this ingredient, it's just that the process is an appetite killer even I don't wanna know. 

 Seafood curry. 

Excellent. Nobody can beat this fella's. Thick, pungent, spicy, sour, in a class of it's own. There's okra, tomatoes, squid, fish meat and prawns with pink torch gingerflower, bayleaf, mint leaf in a red , devilish chowderlike soup. Heavy Indian influence in this Penang Chinese dish. Only letdown was the amount of ingredients inside. Getting lesser and lesser these days. 

Two out of three meant nothing. There we were wolfing down the curry happily with plates of steaming rice when those two men's orders started arriving.

A steamed fish in yellow otak sauce, a mixed veg in wine stew and deep fried chicken cooked in Guinness Stout treacle.

They looked mighty confused and I don't blame them. In fact , I think they lost their appetite. The fish was white as death with a layer of mushy yellow marigold like carpetting on top, vegie looked like it was cooked in 4wd and the chicken looked like oily deep fried mudcake.

Two tables that were poles apart in terms of meal satisfaction. 

And that's how sometimes you get people raving stark mad over a highly recommended place. It's because they were recommended the 'safe' dishes to begin with. Not their fault though , when the owners considers their best dishes , to be nothing extraordinary, just a very simple daily meal unworthy of you and your hard earned money. 

Location : seafood shack next to the Shell station in Weld Quay