melaka: 88 jonker street

melaka is 2 hours south of kuala lumpur, probably the only state that has western influences. it was conquered by the portuguese in their quest of the spice islands, remember how magellan accidentally discovered the philippines because of the spice islands exploration? melaka has been declared as a world heritage site by unesco because of its rich history but of course what lured me to the place was the food. before i move on to that here's a picture of the church in the town square.

jonker street is the main street in melaka, lined up with restaurants, antique stores and even a temple. when you look up melaka, 88 jonker street would always popup. they say that you can get the best cendol at this place. cendol is made up of a green jelly like worms that's made from rice flour and coconut, beans, shaved ice, coconut milk and in melaka they use the famous gula melaka...it tastes like coco jam but darker and more syrupy.

definitely the best cendol i've ever had. fine shaved ice and the gula melaka is really to die for. this one costs around 3.50RM if i'm not mistaken, i had mine with sago. other varieties are available too like my friends' mango ais.

but before we had these luscious desserts we had some snacks first. my friends said this was called goreng-goreng which didn't make sense because goreng-goreng means fried fried? anyway, these are basically fried food items like bean curd sheets, dumplings and all sorts of things you can find in your typical shabu shabu or yang tau fu. this comes with a nice sweet brown sauce with peanuts.

also had noodles, mine was chicken rendang mee if i am not mistaken. basically, chicken curry with noodles. really spicy but has great flavors. forgot how much this was something around 5RM i reckon.

jonker street is an old house turned to a food court of some sort. the food stations mainly the desserts, noodles and the fried items are at the door of the establishment and you line up to order your food. the rest of your party can go inside and look for a table. the place is packed most of the time but i think it's worth the wait.

88 jonker street

melaka

kl: jogoya

this is a hot off my tummy post. just came back from a buffet. jogoya, is one of the well known japanese buffets in kl. i recently read about this ladies promo that the second lady only gets to pay 19.90RM ++ wow, what a steal. however, i found out that it's not applicable on fridays. too bad that i was already set for jogoya and i couldn't think of any other place to eat at so we still decided to go there. i was telling my friends it was to celebrate their brand new cars.

so here's the stuff i've tried. first is my mini hotpot, all kinds of seafoods and other food items i don't know what. i might have eaten something exotic and wouldn't have figured it out. choice of 2 broth, chicken or the xo based. of course i tried the x.o. based broth which i found more unique. there's also a sukiyaki section if you want that kind of soup/broth.

the soup is too bland for my taste, the seafoods - you can barely savor. probably because they've all been soaking in water or melted ice rather. the grumbling tummy wanted soup so this was a must. after the soup, i got me self some appetizers.

shrimp and unagi sashimi and some fresh salmon sashimi. all good, the salmon had a melt in your mouth texture. also got grilled unagi, yummy!!! below is some bamboo clams which i always think look like worms or lampreys. the flavors of the sauce were perfect, spicy with sweet basil...leaning to thai flavors. bad thing? it was too bland, the spices cannot compensate for the lack of salt in this dish and putting soy sauce would not do any good.

also got sweet chilli crabs, again, nice flavor. however, the sauce failed to seep through the crabmeat, making it tasteless and the crab didn't taste that fresh either it seemed to have been frozen for a long time. sauce good...seafood bad.

kinda a bit off but after these food items, i opted to get some dimsum hehe. the siopao just looked moist and nice and i also wanted to get siomai which my friend got but when i got there, there's none left and i had to wait for 7 more minutes, so i just opted for the seafood roll of some sort, which i believe was a good choice since my friend said the siomai wasn't that good.

decided to try more entrees. got the jogoya specials. black pepper lamb, flavorful and tender...loved it! butter fish with xo sauce was also good, rightly seasoned but i just hate the scales of the butter fish.

got some tempura too, i actually don't know if this is technically tempura since it used panko crumbs. usually breaded ebi is called furai but furai is heavily breaded like tonkatsu. this one seems to have used both batter and panko bread crumbs. anyway, it was just ok, umu still has my vote for best tempura and jogoya cooked this one with a used up oil already.

but i'm not done yet. since i wanted to eat fish tonight, everything was mostly seafood. i couldn't resist getting the grilled salmon head. love salmon...love fish heads. this one was perfectly done.

yup i'm done with the mains. let's go for desserts. i simply got lured by the nice display of assorted sweets.

jello shots and pudding of all sorts.

cakes
pies, tarts and pastries

mochi - coincidentally i was craving for mochi balls the other day.

but here's what we got.

creme caramel or leche flan...aaaack something's wrong i couldn't figure it out. my friends say it tasted like cassava or something that is a root crop. i was so disappointed.

mochi both filled with bean paste, not too keen on them. i still love dezato mochi balls. the macaron is not mine, i don't like macarons.

strawberry jello shooter...so so. coffee pudding...more like diluted starbucks coffee jelly...unknown dessert probably caramel flan...winner!!!! only thing i loved among the desserts.

there's a wider range of desserts likes vanilla and chocolate panna cotta, bread pudding, honeydew sago, an ais cendol/kacang station, waffles and haagen dazs like 6 flavors i think. beat that!

overall, jogoya has a wide range of choices though mainly focused on japanese cuisines. the appetizers section has sushi, sashimi, seafood appetizers, pickled veggies and salads. there's a sukiyaki/dimsum station, the hotpot section, the teppanyaki station, the tempura/fried foods section, the seafoods section, the hot dishes section, the grilled section, the wide array of desserts plus drinks station from fruit juices, slush, fresh coconuts, teas and coffee. the service is quite nice and efficient. some stations require you to place your table number clips in bowls in front of the dish you want and then they just deliver it to your table. no boxing out or long lines at the tempura station. the quality of dishes are relatively good and the availability of the food items is not a problem. it was a good experience indeed. the price tag? depends on the time. better check out their website for the exact prices for us, i believe dinner is the most expensive one at 88RM plus tax and service charge which came to about 100RM each. yeah i know it's like the dusit crossover buffet and you get more out of that. but the jogoya experience was really nice that i don't regret it. a little turn off is when you have to pay first before entering and the limited time you can be inside, for us it was 3 hours but then that's sufficient time unless i'm with ultimate foodies who can last up to 4 hours hehe.

jogoya

starhill gallery

bukit bintang, kl

sg: no signboard

when it comes to food, singapore is famous for its chilli crabs. so when i went to sg, i promised myself i ought to try authentic singaporean chilli crabs. looked up the net and two places kept popping up. i was supposed to try long beach at dempsey since i wanted to go to the ben and jerry's resto there. but my throat acted up on me and i finally decided to take a reroute to vivo city instead. good thing they have no signboard there, yes that's the name of the restaurant. i would think that no signboard is one of those old fashioned restos i find here in kl that is not commercialized and has this side street/hawker ambiance. but no! it is one of the most expensive crab places in sg. i reckon they have probably evolved from a hawker stall to a formal resto. enough about the blabbering here's what we got.

my 5 SGD buco hahaha, i just had to show. the hell with the hefty price, i just wanted coconut that time.

buttered crayfish (48SGD). fried crayfish with buttery bits of egg if i'm not mistaken. yummy, but did not awe me. and did you see the price tag? aaack!

singaporean chilli crab (48 SGD) there's no weight indicated, i would like to think that they gave us the smallest since only 2 of us were dining. this is sri lankan crab if i'm not mistaken. since crabs are a big thing in sg, they are very conscious of the species like alaskan king crab and the so called typical crab which is sri lankan.



so this is what chilli crab is supposed to be, rich thick sauce with the egg barely noticeable. the egg is well mixed in that you wouldn't distinctly identify the egg. the sauce i reckon has a hint of shrimp paste which did not agree with my palate. there's too much sauce that four pieces of mantou (2SGD) wouldn't suffice.

after the meal, h asked me if it was remarkable. i said no. i know we weren't hungry when we ate, but that should be the true test right? if you are not famished and yet you find the food so delectable. sadly, i will not be dreaming any of these dishes. i'm now thinking whether the black pepper crabs are better than the chilli crabs. but over all, i would prefer eating crabs in those hawker style side street restos in kl or even in sg. this one is charged to experience, i will not do this again! of course i never contemplated on the price when we were paying for it but later on i realized it was so not worth it.

no signboard

vivo city

singapore

no signboard seafood

SG: mos burger

very few chances to try something new but i thought of MOS burger which they have in SG. so it got on my must eat list. got the spicy mos cheeseburger. the only difference of spicy is that it has jalapeño.

nothing really special about these burgers. the patty is not that juicy and flavorful. the only unique thing is the salsa type sauce which is pretty much similar to sango. in retrospect, sango seems better than this one and i wasn't even impressed with sango.

found garlic and lemon mussels in their menu. it was unique so i wanted to try it.

the mussels came out a bit different from the pictures. these ones are lightly breaded, which i think is much better. however, i kept looking for the garlic and lemon flavor which i didn't taste and somehow the darker color makes me think that the oil used was not fresh but this was still in the morning when everything should be new.

but this meal was not a total disappointment. my love for strawberries drew my attention to another unique item. ichigo bliss (strawberry bliss).

frozen strawberries filled with cream and white chocolate on top. the strawberries are not flavorful enough probably lost its berry flavor due to being frozen already but i still liked it.

mos is still worth a try though for the unique items. i may not be impressed but you might be able to appreciate it more. try the other food items like the rice burgers which might be more interesting, i was told the scallop rice burger is good.

mos burger

raffles city

mos burger sg website

SG: modern peking duck

i saw ajay's post on ion orchard and took a mental note since i was sg bound too. of course like most trips, your itinerary never gets followed. on saturday morning we planned to get bfast at a kopi tiam but we got a little bit behind schedule and our actual stop was on ion mall. because i wanted to try the peking duck from ajay's post we decided to get breakfast here instead.

i love duck, i haven't really had decent peking duck so i don't have a point of comparison for this. it's one of the stalls located outside the actual food hall. if you plan to dine there, order your major items inside the food hall because they don't allow food from the stalls outside.

the stall was newly opened when we got there, the auntie slicing up a freshly cooked duck, you can see it was piping hot still. for 6 sgd, i thought this was pretty cheap you get 5 pieces of duck with hoisin sauce wrapped in thin pancakes.

i'm sure it looked much nicer when i first got it, but the walking jumbled them up inside. thick pieces of duck with a rightly seasoned hoisin not too sweet not too salty. now i wonder, are the duck slices supposed to be thick? i deem that it kinda made the whole thing a bit chewy and not tender. also, is the skin supposed to be not crispy? like i've said, i've never had decent peking duck so i don't have a point of comparison. but i was still happy with it, what a nice way to start a day...so typical of me who likes filling breakfasts. btw, we had beef noodles to go with this too hehe.

p.s. now they call peking duck as beijing duck...wonder why the change in name.

modern peking duck

ion mall

orchard road, singapore

apple dippers

i know i have not been able to blog lately and i've got too much backlog already...as soon as i am up to speed with the new os i am using i'll probably get more things done. just a quick post on mcD. they call it mcD and not mcdo. i always eat at mcdonald's in any country i go to. i made a short trip to singapore recently and got the chance to eat at mcdo and here's what i saw.

i didn't want to eat at 1am in the morning but my friend insisted to go. i decided to get something light. when i saw the pack of apples i remembered those set meals available at boots which is watson's like in the uk. like you pay 3 pounds for a salad or sandwhich plus drinks and dessert which is packed fruits like this one. i was so elated and when i saw that it comes with a caramel dip i was even more ecstatic. costs a dollar for these babies, don't convert so that you'll not find it expensive.

that's about it. i'll do my sg posts first before the melaka trip so watch out for those.