Jian and I headed to town for Amber Chia’s Mahkota Fashion Runway and before heading back to Bukit Beruang, we decided to have something else for dinner. Jian suggested East Garden at Melaka Raya and since I couldn’t come up with anything else, I took his suggestion.

It sure looks like any other cafe in town. The good thing is that it doesn’t smell smokey inside the cafe. On one corner, there’s a work station, which I am not too sure whether one can use it to surf the internet or not. There’s free wifi and newspapers / magazines placed around for diners to surf or read while waiting or having their meal.

Two page menu for food and drinks. Nothing special, nothing significant, nothing different.

Jian ordered a glass of Tiramisu (Yeah, tiramisu has became a drink. WTF!) while I had plain water.

Bored while waiting for our food, I snapped around.

The waiter recommended their fried chicken chop, with different sauce to go along with it. I had one with thousand islands sauce while Jian had his with sweet and sour sauce with sesame seeds. It is served with barely a spoonful of coleslaw, handful of fries and some lettuces, cucumbers and tomatoes for garnishing. Well, its tasted not too bad, but it’s plain normal at the same time.

I had warm longan with white fungus for dessert. It tasted pretty decent, with generous amount of longan inside.

The bill came up to roughly RM25 for the both of us. It wasn’t as expensive as I expected and for the price I am paying, I am not going to be very picky with the taste.

It’s them again!

At night, to celebrate the arrival of Ah Yong Lee Hwee’s new Proton Saga (Actually, it sounded more like because Ah Yong wanted to eat shabu-shabu.), Ah Yong suggested we head down to Puchong for shabu-shabu.

With no disagreement from anyone of us, we found ourselves standing in front of Japanese style steamboat, Shabu-Shabu restaurant barely 30 minutes later. Its Chinese name is a rather weird / odd one, 强强滚日式火锅. It’s at Bandar Puteri Puchong, just behind Giant and not too far from Papa Kopitiam.

Upon entering, there’s a menu with illustrations of various food served. The price range for a bowl of ingredients / items are priced between RM1 and RM4. They are categorized and separated by different coloured bowls, exactly like the pricing mechanism used in Sushi King and many other Japanese restaurants. At the end of the meal, they will collect the bowls and calculate the total price of your meal.

Of course, if you are a big eater or can eat more than 26 plates, then opt for the buffet. It is about RM26 per pax and shouldn’t be any problem for most people to “eat back” their money spent. After paying, the waiter will lead your to your seats.

The restaurant has two floors and each floor can easily accommodate more than 250 people. It is brightly lit and the whole place is very clean for a restaurant of its kind.

The conveyor belt is built as an “U”-shape across the room, with the waiters / waitresses standing inside the enclosed area to serve you and reload the conveyor belt every now and then. However, due to its design, one has to walk a big round just to go to the toilet, which is at the far end of the room.

It is very similar to any other Japanese sushi restaurant. One empty line goes into the kitchen, the other lines comes out filled.

You don’t have to guess what is served on the conveyor belt as there are wooden cube blocks that display the name (in English and Chinese languages) and pictures of the ingredients. If you see something that you want to eat, just grab it from the conveyor belt and you are good to go.

Upon seated, you will notice an empty hole in front of you, which the waiter will then placed a steel pot in it and pour soup into it. Switch on the power with the control panel under the table and your own personal steamboat pot is ready to cook some food.

They will also hand you two bowls of sauces. One is the spring onions, fried garlic mixed with special soy sauce sauce and the other is chili sauce, which tasted slightly spicier than I thought.

For drinks, you got to help yourself by filling your cups up at the designated self-help stations. Only two chilled drinks are served, ice blended grape and ice blended orange juice. They also serve hot plain water and hot green tea. However, there are no ice cubes and therefore, you are stuck with the ice blended beverages.

Honestly, it is really stupid to offer ice blended because ice blended can’t quench your thirst but merely cool your mouth down. You will find yourself sipping really hard on the ice to “drink”.

Oh, did I mention that you need to refill your soup on your own too? Everything, the utensils, soups, sauces and drinks are all available in the self-help station.

Time to eat.

Meanwhile, snap a random pictures of the buggers while eating.

Then, continue to snap and eat.

After some time, get them to pose for you.

The restaurant is famous for its thinly sliced pork meat, which to me, is totally nothing to shout about. It wasn’t seasoned; it wasn’t marinated; it certainly didn’t taste any special, to me. Just thinly sliced pork meat, that’s about it. Even my mum could do that at home, probably thinner and taste better too! So much about the hu-ha of thinly sliced pork meat.

We spent almost two hours in the restaurant, helping ourselves with the endless supply of food. Overall, the food was quite okay, decent amount of varieties and taste wise, it was mediocre.

However, as I ate, I discovered a few things.

1) Since you have your own pot, literally speaking, you are actually eating steamboat alone throughout the night. Loneliness creeps in after a while. I felt kinda empty even though my three buddies were sitting just next to me.

2) Steamboat is supposed to be a group activity, where everybody waits for the soup to boil, throws in all the ingredients to cook, eats, helping others to fill up their bowls with food you don’t want to eat and etc., but this particular type of steamboat doesn’t give me that feeling at all.

3) Because you are eating alone, you are the one taking the ingredients all by yourself. After a while, you will find yourself taking the same old stuffs again and again and again. It happened to me and I ended up eating more fish balls in one night compared to the past six months. If its the normal steamboat, my bowl will be filled up with unwanted food because the guys always put stuffs that I don’t want to eat yet I have to eat because I have to finish the food in my bowl.

4) The four-in-a-line / row seating arrangement isn’t very convenient for chit chatting throughout the dinner.

5) I don’t really enjoy steamboat buffet, honestly and instinctively.

It was decent, but I won’t go back again, unless I don’t have other choice or the majority wants to dine in similar concept restaurants. I was satiated but I didn’t feel good or really enjoyed the dinner.

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.

Simon once told me about a famous Chinese restaurant in Serdang that serves some fried fish dish, which was eventually featured in The Star not too long after that.

According to the address, my friends and I ended up at this restaurant called Ya Lie, according to han yu pin yin that is. I wasn’t sure whether it was this restaurant featured by The Star and the one Simon referring to, but we decided to give it a try as there were quite a crowd at that moment.

Again, it’s another makeshift restaurant. Honestly, there are many houses in this new village that were converted into restaurants, shop lots, food courts and etc. You can see restaurants practically every where and at every corner inside this super packed new village.

There were also three cooks, just liked the Serdang Little Kitchen Restaurant that I blogged about few days back and the food was served in no time. I don’t know what 菜胆 is called in English, but it tasted average. We eat healthily, hence, the greens, not some stupid rip-you-off bean sprouts.

We ordered half herbal chicken, which tasted rather bland. The soup wasn’t boiled long enough to let the herbs release their flavour and the chicken wasn’t soft enough.

Deep fried calamaris with salted egg. What’s with salted egg? I just ate salted egg with bitter gourd the other day. Salted egg with Gardenia bread, anyone? It’s not pure salted egg anyway, as there were chunks of onions, gingers and spring onions, a mixture of everything. The calamaris weren’t crunchy either. Not that bad, but I might or might not order it again, depends.

Deep fried seafood tau fu. Didn’t I tell you that homemade seafood tau fu is so overrated these days that every single restaurant calls them his / her specialty when I suspect it all comes from the same supplier. Someone should start investigating the origin of the so called homemade seafood tau fu and bust it for once and for all. Average, for me.

Their specialty, stuffed ma yau ala yong tau fu style. Well, they took out all the meat from the fish, minced and turned them into fish paste, before stuffing it back to the fish to deep fry. Well, it tasted pretty much like those fish paste in yong tau fu. However, it has a firmer texture and more bouncy. Nice and definitely delicious.

The bill came to RM84 and all of us got a shock of our life. However, after getting into the car and talking about it, we came to a conclusion that it was within the reasonable range as we had half a chicken, sotongs and a fish. Overall, we had a pretty decent and fulfilling meal.