Sim Koa Yen is not just a durian orchard farm located somewhere near Durian Tunggal. It is a durian orchard that uses minimal pesticides, only organic fertilizers and was awarded SALM (Farm Accreditation Scheme of Malaysia). Those are not the important facts, the important thing is that they serve durian buffet for only RM35 per adult, RM18 per child below age 12 and F.O.C for child below age 5.

Unlike D’ Paradise that served low quality durians or none at all (Read Jesslyn’s first hand experience of D’ Paradise by clicking here.), Sim Koa Yen up a notch by serving high grade durians such as “Red Prawn”, D24, “Jiabili”, “Cibei”, “Raja Kunyit” and etc.

They had such good reputations that Singaporeans would organize tours to pay the farm a visit. He even had customers from Taiwan too!

Finding the “entrance” was easy, but from the main road to the orchard, the 2.5km route took us almost 30 minutes, passing by rubber plantations, dragon fruit plantations, vast fields, lakes and chicken farm.

Finally, we saw some really big durians, waiting for the “ripe” time to drop. At the “station”, piles of durians were gathered at one corner, which were to be served later at a private function. Come to think of it, it could probably be my first visit to a durian orchard. Heh!

Instead of using chopping knife to open the durians, the owner has created a specially crafted “device” to pry those durians by just pressing down the handle. Seriously, opening a durian is as easy as ABC and probably takes less than 30 seconds to fully open it.

Since it was a buffet, we were served with a huge varieties of durians. From the dry to wet type, sweet to bitterish type, branded species to kampung species, you name it, they serve it. Considering that I didn’t manage to eat a single pulp of durian last year, I whacked as many as I could. My favourite got to be “Raja Kunyit”, sweet and creamy. My mum would probably prefer “Horlor”, wet and slightly bitter kind though.

Seriously, I never eat so much durians at one go in my life. I was there from 12.30pm until 3pm, all I ever did throughout my time there was, eat, eat, and eat. In fact, by the time I left the orchard, I already felt the heat inside me and my throat was acting funny.

Some artistic shot. :D

If you are a durian lover, like me, you should give it a try. One needs to make appointment before paying visit as they need to collect the durians before that.

Sim Koa Yen
MC-2-34 & MC-2-35,
Jalan SB Utama, Taman Seri Bayan,
76100 Durian Tunggal,
Alor Gajah, Melaka.

RM35 per adult.
RM18 per child (below age 12).
F.O.C per child (below age 5).

012-6816895 / 012-6786895 / 06-5532500 / 06-5532600 (Reservation is a MUST!)

My boss, Allison, Pelf Yeen and myself so happened had to go to a place together and after finishing what we were supposed to do, we headed out for lunch.

Seeing that we needed to pass by Cheng and recalling that there’s a bah kut teh restaurant that I wanted to try but yet to, I suggested it and most of us agreed, except for 50%-vegetarian Pelf Yeen. She only eats chicken and fish, the white meat. Sad, right?

SH (Shun Fatt) Bah Kut Teh Restaurant, said to be a branch from somewhere else, and this particular branched could be the 17th or 19th. Why not 18th? There’s a branch in Bachang and that branch is the 18th, according to the signboard, that is.

As it was lunch time, there were quite a lot of customers, occupying most of the tables at that moment.

Garlics, cili padis, dark soy sauce with red chilies. A must, in every bah kut teh meal, together with a pot of Chinese tea.

Since the invention of gas stove, many has ditched charcoal fire but in this particular restaurant, they use charcoals to boil / cook your pot of bah kut teh. Yes, old school style. While using charcoals will give you a smoky smell to your already fragrant dishes, it is not easy to control the heat and fire. Slightly bigger, there goes your food. Anything too small, you get uncooked food.

The pot of bah kut teh, surprisingly, tasted nothing like bah kut teh. The soup was way too clear for bah kut teh, it was almost like those noodles soup. Taste wise, it was more of herbal soup with somewhat slightly stronger angelica (当归) taste. Honestly, after patronizing a few bah kut teh stalls, I wouldn’t call this as bah kut teh.

However, my boss like the soup though.

For the non pork eater, we ordered a small pot of chicken cooked in sesame oil.

The aromatic sesame oil was simply irresistible and I quickly dug in once I took my photos. While it wasn’t the best, it was definitely delicious. Just the right amount of oiliness, with thick soy sauce for the flavour and sesame oil for the fragrance. Yummy! However, it is either they used a very skinny chicken or they simply chopped the meat. There were bones everywhere, I found myself chewing on the bones more than the meat itself. Probably they should have diced it into chicken cubes instead of chopping it like minced meat.

While it wasn’t entirely disappointing, their bah kut teh is definitely not my kind of bah kut teh. However, I got to applaud them for using pork ribs instead of those pathetic sliced meat and meat balls yet proudly declaring it as bah kut teh. It always give me the WTF-feeling whenever I order bah kut teh yet seeing meat balls floating on the soup like some fish balls.

Will I return? Nope.

Just not my kind of bah kut teh lah! It’s an acquired taste kind of bah kut teh. You can try, if you want to. Probably, you, like my boss, would like it!

Le Garden cafe, probably the latest eatery in Dataran Pahlawan, is definitely the rising star and popular place for good food among students recently.

Nothing fancy about the contemporary interior design. Just some oval shaped ceilings and warm lighting to give the restaurant a warm fuzzy mood. Although the spaces between each table could have been wider to avoid the cramped feeling and able to dine in comfortably.

Malacca lacks of decent buffet places. Seoul Garden at Mahkota Parade? Horrendous. Carry On at Melaka Raya? It used to be THE place but it has outlived its glory and era. Its been operating since my secondary schooling days and the food are still the same old same old even until today. Hence, the move to introduce buffet in Le Garden cafe is just the right time and definitely money making.

For RM25, you get to eat all you can eat steamboat buffet.

Of course, we (Allison, Jun Hao and I) weren’t there for the buffet. They have a la carte menu, serving both western and local dishes. We were there for that, in the name of food review write up. Heh! I love my job. *gloats*

Anyway, beverage wise, we were served with the fantasy series. White Fantasy, made using ribena syrup, vanilla flavoured ice cream and shaved ice. A recommendation came from the floor manager. As for Sunrise, its ribena and orange juice.

I had the Fantasy, also mixed with ribena syrup but with lychee and peach syrup this time. Seriously, very refreshing and unique indeed. Why nobody thought of that before? I didn’t take any picture of my drink though.

Kicking off our free lunch was the bruschetta. Cold and thick tar tar sauce mixed with chunks of smoked salmon fish, carrots, spring onions and bla bla bla, topped on lightly toasted crunchy bruschetta. Finger licking good, it was seconds later after I finished my first one when I hurriedly grabbed the last piece. I sure hope the amount of tar tar sauce on the bread doesn’t decrease greatly in my next visit.

Rendang chicken, a very popular dish in Malaysia and goes along very well with almost any dishes at any given time of the day. As normal as it sounds, the chef didn’t screw it up and tasted pretty well.

Lamb shank, the portion is a little huge for most average person but still manageable. Unlike most lamb shank served in other places, theirs is more on the dry side. You don’t see overflowing gravy and sauce poured over the lamb. The meat was tender and somewhat juicy, due to the natural fat in the meat itself and full of flavours. It was served with portions of potato wedges and sauteed vegetables. Yes, broccolis and cauliflowers, how I hate them.

I never like udang masak lemak. That’s because I never like the sourness that the pineapples give to the food, especially when I taste more sourness / pineapple taste than the curry itself. They got the sour and curry taste ratio just right (or maybe just the way how I like it to be), not overpowering each other. However, the prawns used weren’t that fresh that day else it would have been a great dish. I should have ordered white rice.

“This city deserves a better class of beef steaks.” - Jason Lioh.

Yes, this line sounds very familiar if you have watched the latest “The Dark Knight“’s trailer.

In this historical city, its close to impossible to get an affordable and decent enough steak. I am talking about real juicy, thick and tender beef steak, not those over cooked, thinner than a piece of A4 paper beef slices served in most cafes. Apart from Rock & Roll Blues Cafe, I can now add Le Garden Cafe as another place to have beef steak.

The chef is a proper chef and I am sure that he can cook it just the way how you want your steak to be. We had the beef sirloin, a huge slab of beef meat with less fat, although I still prefer my rib eye. Again, it is served with potato wedges and some greens. Maybe they should give the customers to choose between potato wedges or mashed potatoes, better still, baked potatoes. Oh, and I noticed they really like to use alfalfa to garnish the dishes too.

Lady fingers with belacans, a classic Nyonya dish. It was very sour due to the lime juice but Allison said she didn’t taste any sourness in it. Preparing the lady fingers is the easy part, its getting the right taste of belacan that is difficult. There are so many brands of belacans out there, made by different manufacturers, but which one is the best, I don’t know but I do know that I have tasted better ones. Although not perfect, its decent enough. I like my belacans to be spicier and slightly saltier. for your information.

We also had clay pot asam fish head, which we didn’t touch and save it for the kitchen staffs. Well, we didn’t really know how to eat and enjoy fish head like most elderly would. Instead of “dirtying” it, we left it for the kitchen staffs to finish them. How nice of us, right?

Udang goreng asam jawa. Whatever it is, its another Nyonya dish, if not mistaken. Most of the time, my mum would cook big and fresh prawns in this style. Unlike the previous udang masak lemak, the prawns used in this dish were fresh. It tasted pretty nice but it would be even better if some chopped cili padis are added, which my mum would do.

I found myself taking one after another one with my hands, and the whole plate of prawns were finished in no time. Come to think of it, I wonder whether Allison and Jun Hao managed to try this dish.

The salmon fillet with spaghetti and tomato based sauce were really good too! The big, really big, slab of salmon fish were nicely pan fried, sealing the natural sweetness of the white meat in it. Spoonful of brown sauce spread across the meat to give the extra flavouring. The spaghettis were cooked al dente and mixed together with the slightly sourish tomato sauce, and voila!, you get a really delicious main course.

For mozzarella cheese lovers, this is the errm… appetizer that you should order. Two thick slices of mozzarella cheese sandwiched between three slices of bread, then dipped into some flour liked mixture before being deep fried. Crunchy bread on the outside, melting cheese on the inside. To avoid too much cheese aftertaste, they have the slightly sourish pizzaiola sauce at the bottom to offset it. Black olives for garnishing. We even ordered another one to eat.

Well, that was our food review. Although a few of my friends said their buffet weren’t that good, from what I have tasted, their a la carte dishes were absolutely above average. They weren’t disappointing and I might be returning to Le Garden Cafe for a decent western food.

I didn’t manage to look at the price list, but from the food and decoration, it should be on the high side for Malacca’s standard. However, for the price you are going to pay, it is definitely more worth it than the so-bad-until-I-didn’t-want-to-blog-about-it Taro Restaurant.

Hmm… Makes me wonder why the name Le Garden.

Good Morning Vietnam is the latest outlet among the hundreds or possibly thousands of restaurants in Malacca. Located at the less well known Plaza Mahkota (The area where Nadeje Patisserie is.), it is aimed to serve authentic Vietnamese food to the locals at an affordable price.

However, it is not the first of its kind as previously, there was too a Vietnamese restaurant in Melaka Raya two years back but eventually went “missing”. I still remember my previous boss told me that the owner asked us to do a food review on them in order to give them some publicity and save their business. Well, I did try their food but figured it wasn’t worth mentioning. You can still read the post dated May 2006.

No air condition, much to my disappointment. Some wooden tables and stools, some pictures on the green coloured wall and that’s pretty about it, the interior design. Tight on budget, perhaps.

Pelf Yeen ordered the lemonade while I ordered Red Dragon, ice blended dragon fruit. Pretty nice and smooth, as there were more fruits (real fruits, not the artificial flavouring kind) than ice / water. Probably a little bit of milk might give the drink an even smoother texture and aftertaste.

I ordered beef stew with white rice, which came with three slices of cucumbers and tomatoes each, a piece of lettuce, fried egg and a bowl of beef stew. The decoration items used is pretty much the Chinese style. Chinese restaurants love to decorate their dishes with cucumbers, tomatoes and lettuces, usually a few slices here and there. While I am fine with the fried egg, wouldn’t a sunny side up be nicer?

I didn’t dig out those beef chunks and place them nicely on the plate for photos. The beef was tender enough and full of juice and tomato sauced based soup / gravy. I am not sure how stew supposed to taste like, but I am on the fence for this one as I didn’t like the way too tomato-ish sauce and soup.

Mei Mei ordered the lemongrass chicken with rice set. From the looks of it, I reckoned the chicken was going to be really dry, which turned out to be true.

I ordered their three-in-one dish, consisted of deep fried and wet spring roll each and a few pieces of lemongrass chicken. I like the deep fried one, as the wet one tasted like grass because of the “greens” used in side, as you can see in the cross sectional picture. The chickens, as said in the previous paragraph, were very dry. Two kinds of sauce were served together to go along with the spring rolls. One tasted like plum sauce mixed with tomato while the other one, I couldn’t really guess it.

I have lowered down my expectations when I visited this restaurant. It wasn’t that impressive or that disappointing, but the question of whether am I going to revisit the restaurant, its a little difficult to decide for now. I might not go there for the food, but a couple of drinks should be okay. Oh, and they should really increase the items on their menu by a few folds, very limited choices, I would say.

I like potatoes. Who doesn’t?

I like curry.

I like potatoes with curry sauce.

Funny how I don’t like curry puffs because of the pastry, especially the super yucky and hard sides. Moreover, it’s not easy to find a good curry puff. It’s either too hard, too soft, too dry, too puffy, too wet, too plain or too…

There is this Indian lady that sells deep fried stuffs (traditional Indian snacks) at a junction not too far from my house. She sells this snack, that tastes exactly like a curry puff but without the pastry. Instead, it is wrapped with a thin layer of batter which is then deep fried as well. There’s pieces of onions and even poppy seeds, which might or might not explain my addiction to it.

I know it looks gross, but it is absolutely finger licking-ly delicious. Definitely ideal for those who are going out for a picnic, with those blue and white checkered picnic blanket.

And I have been eating this for lunch for the past four days. It’s cheap, three for only RM1.

I don’t know what is it, any Indian readers that can help me identify this snack? Ex-housemate Sanjev Sunder said he knew what it was, but didn’t know the name.

The stall is just near the vegetarian restaurant at Taman Bukit Melaka, near to the main road.

Updated : It’s called bonda. Thanks, Visithra