After hearing reading so much about the famous spicy pepper soup in Serdang, I finally had the chance to savour it before I went back Malacca. Whenever I am in KL, I usually won’t be in Serdang during dinner time as I would be meeting other bloggers in some shopping malls. Hence, this was one of the rare occasions which I had dinner with my buddies (Ah Kit, Ah Yong and Li Sui) near their home.

Restoran Kian Kee, situated right behind the community hall along the main street of Serdang town, is famous for their spicy pepper soup and chicken in Chinese wine. The restaurant is rather old and honestly, it can’t even be called as a decent restaurant. It’s more like a stall that operates in a shop.

They were featured in “Ho Chiak!” before and the sticker is pasted on the fridge cum menu. There are not much varieties for you to choose from, and don’t be surprise if you see the customers sitting next to your table ordering the exactly same dishes as you. As written on the menu pasted on the fridge, there are just that much of dishes for you to order.

Spicy pepper soup (RM7 per serving.),
Chicken in Chinese wine (RM7 per serving.),
Tau fu (RM4 for small and RM8 for big.),
Vegetables (RM5 for small and RM7 for big.),
Drunken prawns (RM35 for small and RM65 for big),
Prawns in Chinese wine soup (RM25 for small and RM50 for big.).

There’s no need to describe how the vegetable and tau fu tasted, right? However, my mum does prepare the same tau fu dish too, albeit a cold one. The tau fu is kept in the fridge and the sauce are poured over when it is ready to be served. They serve their tau fu warm.

The boiling spicy pepper soup came in a huge clay pot. Inside the soup are all sort of pork meats, intestines, lean meat, stomach and etc., with a few strands of vegetables. All of us have very high threshold for spiciness, hence, we requested for extra spiciness to give us the kick. It tasted really good, especially when it is boiling hot but not when it is cold. The strong peppers gave us the kick also a little numbness on the tongue. Best eaten during rainy days.

The chicken in Chinese wine (花雕) came in as a pot of dark, black and thick gravy sauce, which doesn’t look appetizing at all from the photographs. I really love the gravy but not the chicken meat. They gave us a very skinny chicken with not much meat. I know its kampungkai, still… The wine flavours wasn’t strong enough to emit the unique fragrant but could still be tasted by the tongue. It was good.

I am going to persuade them to order the prawn dishes the next time I have my dinner there. They look really good, from the picture taken by Julie of http://juliethebiscuit.blogspot.com. Look at the amount of prawns. The soup? It’s going to taste great, with the wine.

After our lunch with Suthing, Sook Ying and I practically went to UKM for a drive through tour. As for the reason why we were in UKM, you got to ask Mei Mei. After wasted so much time and petrol, we ended up empty handed.

Not only UKM, we even went to KL Sentral as Mei Mei wanted to buy a few baju kurungs for her friends in her university. Anyway, luckily the jam heading towards KL Sentral at 5pm wasn’t that jam yet.

Throughout the month of July, I helped Mei Mei with her studies and to reward me, she treated me a meal at Sushi Groove.

Hence, Sushi Groove, it was; with Sis JiNz, again. By the way, Sushi Groove is at 1U.

The restaurant doesn’t resemble a conventional Japanese restaurants at all (no rotating belt). Instead, it looked more like a green coloured themed pub / club with dark atmosphere and cool lighting effects on the wall. You just got to love the walls, the walls certainly created a very nice effect to the overall interior design of the restaurants.

There are two sections of the restaurants, one for customers who prefer to have a little space of their own and a long table / communal table where you could be sitting next to a group of strangers and such. Service was fast and the waiters / waitresses were friendly.

The girls did the ordering and I only insisted that I wanted unagis. Other than that, I had no problem with anything ordered. They ordered a plate of salmon / shashimi, which had only 5 slices but very thick ones. I don’t know why the salmons came in such thick slices. It just doesn’t taste right when you put it inside your mouth. The meat just won’t sort of melt away or dissolve slowly as you chew on it.

Each sushi has its own name which described itself very clearly, although some of them doesn’t really make sense. The sushis are also modified and localized to suit everyone’s taste buds. According to the leaflet displayed, they even added cili padis in their sushi. Some of the sushis even came with cheeses and mangoes. It’s more like a fusion sushi than Japanese sushi. Not to mention, they really took the time to “create” their sushis like making the prawn / mango sushis to resemble a dragon, the unagi sushi to resemble a centipede and etc.

It is unique on its own when you compare to other sushis restaurants like Sushi King or Sakae Sushi. You got to applaud their effort for making themselves standing out from other Japanese restaurants.

I’m not a fan of Japanese noodles and miso soup. However, the noodles were firm, bouncy and delicious. I bet Mei Mei enjoyed it a lot because she finished the whole bowl. I had spicy beef patty with eggs and rice. I really like the beef patty, absolutely juicy and yummy. The patty reminded me of the grilled Ramly burger that I once blogged before. The chilies flakes and powders added the much needed spiciness.

No sushi meal will be complete if there’s no unagis for me. We ordered not 1 but 2 unagis sushi, that came in a form of centipede. The unagis tasted much better than the one I had at Sushi King (Too sweet.), Sakae Sushi (Nice but Sushi Groove tasted nicer.) and Jogoya (Too slime-y). Moreover, the sushis that came with it were delicious too. They had this crunchy ingredient in it that made the sushis tasted very nice. This is the best unagis sushis I had so far, no doubt.

After the RM600 bill, the unagis really cheered me up. I bet the girls wanted to slap my face when they saw the big grin on my face as I helped myself with the unagis.

To end the dinner, Mei Mei ordered green tea ice cream. It tasted quite nice but also not nice at the same time. I don’t know how to describe it, it’s rather powder-ish instead of milky. It has the strong green tea taste in it but the taste tasted rather artificial at the same time too.

Mei Mei paid the bill and the bill came up to RM130. For the price we paid, I would say that’s a pretty decent meal. Not to mention, the unagis totally kicked ass. I walked out Sushi Groove as a happy man with a contended stomach.

Half way through our dinner, May Gin dropped by to pass me something, but that will be for another post. After our dinner, we walked around 1U as the girls needed to do a little bit of shopping. You should see the look on sis’s face when she swipe that credit card for that RM66.50 shoe, that’s even after discount. Totally no remorse!

It wasn’t easy getting up at 4AM but I did it by sleeping at 11.30PM the night before.

Considering that I didn’t have any class on Thursday and no more mid term examinations to sit for, I decided to send Sook Ying off to US at KLIA, as this could be her last time flying to US for her studies. In other words, she’s graduating soon.

Just when I thought I was the only crazy one who would wake up at 4AM, drive all the way from Malacca to KLIA just to send her off. Yan was equally crazy too! He came from Kelana Jaya, took the KLIA express train at KL Sentral and reached the airport at 7.30AM, that also he had to report for work at 10AM.

When Yan took out his Nikon D40 dSLR, I kept my camera and played with his. Certainly, dSLR has more stuffs to play with and the sound of the shutter mechanism is really addictive. However, is it me or that the camera itself is underexposed, hence, the darker pictures? Canon 40D has just been released!

You didn’t cry, as you said in your post if someone was to send you off at the airport.

I hope you enjoyed your summer holiday as much as I enjoyed your companion. We have been spending quite a lot of time together this time, haven’t we? Good luck for your final semester and Gor will see you again by December / January. -hugs-

I got the burst tires fixed early the next morning and it was a massive RM600 blow to my already flatten wallet. Nonetheless, I still went ahead with my plans after the mechanics gave me 2 tires temporarily while they got the tires fixed.

Previously on “Nasi Lemak” (Prison Break tone), Suthing (婷婷**), Sook Ying (Mei Mei) and I agreed to meet up for lunch and Suthing would bring us to a restaurant at Serdang that is famous for its clay pot lou shu fan.

What I heard from my cousin brother (Kelvin Leoh) was that the lou shu fan is cooked in a very thick broth, so thick as if you are eating shark fin soup or something like that. Well, that was what my cousin brother told me. Not to mention, it came highly recommended from him. When Suthing pointed out the direction to the restaurant, I only realized the restaurant is just 1km away from Ah Kit’s apartment (my “hotel”).

Suthing ordered a claypot lou shu fan, honey roasted pork ribs, black pepper udon noddles and kam heong prawns.

The black pepper udon noodles didn’t taste really good as it was cooked ala hokkien mee style. There were no black pepper taste at all. The difference lied within the noodles used. It was thicker and more Q than the yellow noodles. I saw many tables ordered this dish but to me, I don’t really recommend it. I ended up adding a lot of the given sambal and at least, it tasted much better. The sambal was heavily mixed with belacans, very salty but nice.

The kam heong prawns didn’t taste like kam heong. It tasted more like garlic heong prawns. The amount of garlics put inside the dish could easily kill a vampire. Nonetheless, I absolutely loved it because I love garlics. Nice, delicious, crunchy, fragrant but oily, very oily. Other than that, it’s nice.

The honey roasted pork ribs were absolutely finger licking good. The fragrant smell of sweet honey definitely opened up my appetite. Sweet on the outside and juicy on the inside. I got to say, they really put a lot of effort to marinate the pork ribs. It takes time to get the pork ribs to absorb the honey’s taste, you do know that, don’t you? However, Mei Mei didn’t like it though. She was commenting something about the pork, which I have forgotten what was it.

Last but not least, their signature dish, clay pot lou shu fan. The gravy soup was really thick, a mixture of soup, corn flour, lots of eggs, minced meat and mushrooms, garnished with spring onions and a few dashes of sesame oil. The closest taste that I can use to describe the soup is a thick chicken porridge with lots of eggs inside. Despite the small size of the clay pot, it was very filling for all three of us.

The lunch cost Suthing RM35, reasonably priced, I would say. This got to be the second nicest lou shu fan dish after SS2 Murni’s.

Thanks, Suthing!

Apparently, Snowybabie was having lunch at the same restaurant too! Yet, she didn’t come up to say “Hi!”. Damn shit, right? She should be prosecuted!

Next time, if anyone of you happen to see me at anywhere, anytime with anyone, do come up to say “Hi!” lah! Bloggers meet bloggers, nothing to be shy about what!