Location: Family restaurant located 20 minutes drive from Igan Bridge. About an hour drive from Sibu town.

So why on earth did we spend the whole evening driving and searching for this nameless roadside restaurant? Because we wanted to taste some authentic dishes cooked by a former chef who used to head the Hock Ju Lao’s kitchen, once the top restaurant in Sibu back in the 80’s. But we loved the idea. There are many top chefs in the world actually opened their little restaurants in the middle of nowhere yet still cooking really good food.

After an hour of driving, we arrived at this family restaurant. Run by his family members, I could hardly see the chef inside his tiny little kitchen but I still believed the food would be excellent this evening. When you still got it, you got it.

We ordered a tableful of food, many which, used to be Hock Ju Lao’s signature dishes.

We ordered the Ji Quan, type of old Foochowdeep fried meatballs. It had crispy outer crust and soft meat filling inside, with strong aroma of Chinese Five Fragrance Spice flavor. The meat was rather mushy. Very rustic in presentation and flavor. Like I said, very unrefined food.

The steamed Siu Mai (Siow Bee) was probably using the same mince meat as the Ji Quan caused they had the same taste and texture. The outer skin was made of glutinous powder, sticky and light. Its a better idea to dip with some soy sauce and chilli sauce for extra flavor.

And then the Stir-fried Midin with Chinese Red Wine, always my favorite dish in Sibu. The used good Midin, tender and crunchy. Loved it. But I would beg for more red wine in the dish. Overall, I really liked it.

The Stir-fried Cangkuk Manis with Egg was another brilliant dish. Very flavorful. The Cangkuk Manis (type of sweet local vegetable) was cooked with garlic and egg. Very flavorful. Cangkuk Manis is not an easy dish to cook. As the leaves will welt tremendously, you need a bit oil to make the dish work. Too much of it will spoil the dish. Too little, the whole dish will be dry and inedible. I thought the Cangkuk Manis was cooked really well.

The Mixed Vegetable Soup had many ingredients such as bell pepper, cauliflower, tomato, red carrot, fresh mushroom, fresh baby corns, black fungus, Gua Chai (local bitter green) and pork. The soup tasted really well balanced, a bit of salty, sour and sweet at the same time. Again its very flavorful.

Then came the Gong Bao style Stir-fried Baby Clams with onions, ginger, dried chilli and celery. Because red wine was added during the cooking process, the smell was absolutely dynamite. And it looked really well too. The sauce was thick and very flavorful; sweet, salty and spicy at the same time, but not over the top. We could still taste the sweetness from the clams. I have tried many similar dishes everywhere in Sarawak, but I thought his, was one of the best. Very memorable.

But I might not want to return for the next, the used-to-be-my-favorite dish, Duck steamed with Hong Zhou (Rice Wine Deposit). My problem with this dish was that despite it had good red color, there’s hardly any red wine taste in the dish. The duck was fatty and tough too. Didn’t like it at all. Severe drop of quality.

Well, so there we had it. But certainly we came hoping for something more refined. Maybe we needed to take into account that he no longer had a full professional staffs to work with or fancy ingredients to play with. We paid RM 65 for the meal.

I don’t think the evening’s food was bad or anything. But when your customers make an effort to drive half a world to reach here, you need to be impressive. I thought the food was a bit too rustic. And I disagreed with the price too. With that kind of price and the amount of petrol we needed to burn in order to come here and return, I thought its hard to persuade anyone to make the same trip.

I had tremendous respect for Hock Ju Lao and the chef himself. They were a huge part of my childhood memories. They were the standard of the old foochow food.

But if you were not born during the 80’s in Sibu, you’ll probably never heard of Hock Ju Lao. And you’ll probably won’t want to come here in the first place. But we glad we took the journey. The way coming here was in high spirit. The way back however, was a bit dark and creepy.

We looked at the night sky and saw Two fading Stars.

Cafe And Restaurant, Chinese specialty, News

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 5:27 am and is filed under Chinese specialty, Cafe And Restaurant, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.