Chinese Restaurant At Winner Hotel

Winner Hotel's Chinese restaurant is one of the oldest restaurants in town. Even after bigger and fancier hotels came up, those who preferred taste over ambience would still chose Winner's Chinese restaurant for wedding banquets. But over time the place became really shabby and small compared to TABH, Pan Pacific and Magellan Sutera, which are now the top places for wedding banquets. With the preference for ambience and grandeur first and food last, wedding banquets are terrible gastronomic experiences, and I have not heard of one good wedding banquet dinner in any of these fancy hotels. People just accept the fact that hotels can't do good banquet dinners, with their constraints such as no pork allowed, no msg and no big burning burners and woks and lack of good Chinese chefs. Not only that, with wedding banquets now at 100 tables compared to the modest 20-30 tables in my time, if you arrived late, you don't even get to meet the bride and groom. You are treated to a boring slide show of their youthful days before they met each other, then the mandatory picture of their university graduation, then pictures taken during their courtship and finally, if you are still watching, pictures of their wedding. You make small talk with people you don't know sitting at your table and maybe you can catch a glimpse (if you haven't yet escaped through the side doors) of the couple with their parents on the stage far away doing a general toast and wave to the crowd like the Queen or the Pontiff on special days.

Of all the restaurants for wedding banquets, the best in KK was the now extinct Borneo Hotel, out in the second beach of Tanjung Aru. Borneo Hotel banquet food is legendary in this town. Even at 40 tables, the hotel's restaurant turned out exceptional dishes like deep fried stuffed crab claws, seafood gratin in crab shells, crispy fried chicken, abalone kailan and many more. What a pity this generation is growing up eating substandard banquet dinners. When I was a kid, I looked forward to those dinners because wedding banquets were special occasions thrown by parents to to fete their friends to the best money can buy. In those days, sharks fins were real and the ingredients were of top quality.

The Chinese restaurant in Winner Hotel has recently re-opened after renovation, and I was told that the food is very good. I agree with A, who directed me to Winner, that it is impossible to find a restaurant that serves Chinese-Cantonese food like the old days and Winner is probably the only one left. So with a lot of expectation, 12 of us dined at Winner last night.

I shall call this dinner The Good, The So-So and The Ugly.

The Good



This came steaming hot and the fish maw was flavorful while the soup was not too starchy. Like my FIL said, it was the best fish maw soup so far.



Crispy skin chicken. I could hear the crunch when Wey bit into the skin. Also, unlike many places where the chicken is precooked and re-fried, this was not so the meat was moist and tasty.



This was my favorite of the night, steamed white pomfret Teochew style. Although the pomfret was from the freezer not the tank, it didn't have that frozen smell and taste. The tomatoes, tamarind seeds, ja cai and all made the sauce slightly tangy and sweet while the fish was tender and smooth. Very well done.



Sabah veg with garlic, done nicely leaving the veg crunchy and delicious. As L's mom pointed out, this is a dish that can never be replicated at home, simple as it looks. I agree. Unless you have an inferno for a burner, you will end up with a plate of wet and soft stalks.

The So-So



The hot and cold platter was made up of good and bad appetisers. The jellyfish was good, not overly soaked with bicarb or whatever, the processed fish and prawn fingers were okay, I'm not sure about the duck, the salad prawns was tasteless except for the mayo and the sharks' fins scrambled egg was heavy and wet, ugh.



I am often wary of ordering braised pork leg because I have not eaten any that comes near to my MIL's. Again, I was disappointed. The leg was done soft and tender, which was good, but the taste was somehow 'just almost there'. It was like they either didn't use enough soy sauce or didn't sear it at the beginning. Wey, for whom I ordered this dish, was the first to eat it and he whispered to me, "There's a plastic flavor!" I took a bite and knew what he meant. It was really the flavor of Chinese rose wine, a wine that is so highly scented it can spoil a dish if you use more than say a teaspoon. I once stewed pork belly with an overdose of Chinese rice wine, and Wey made me promise to never cook that dish again. The rose wine Winner had used was lighter in flavor, but still, it was there and I think they should have used Shaoxin wine instead.



Maybe because I like my lotus leaf rice simple, with just the flavor of the lotus leaf infused in good rice, I didn't like Winner's version which had peas, carrots, corn niblets (that trio of frozen veg which spells cheap ingredients), Chinese sausages, ham and I don't know what else. It was like a bad fried rice in lotus leaf.

I really feel that the next dish is at the borderline, between so-so and ugly.



I was looking forward to taro ring with mixed veg, one of my favorite dishes and something I've tried cooking recently without satisfactory results. Winner's taro ring is just as bad as mine, edible but not impressive. A good taro ring should be light, lacy and crispy outside and the mash inside should be soft and tasty. Winner's taro ring has a tasty mash (but would've been better if the ring was thicker so that it'll taste 'meatier') but the exterior was not lacy and crunchy. What made the dish taste even worse was the mixed veg inside, a lapchap mix of baby corn, celery, carrots, peppers, mushrooms, chicken all cut too fine and made too jook (overwhelming in taste) by the addition of 5 spice powder and too much cornstarch.

The Ugly





The much awaited 8-jewel duck. This was a dish I hated as a child, but have grown to appreciate with time. I can do a pretty mean version, but the last time I did one was 15 years ago. The duck has to be deboned, seared and then steamed until even the bones are soft.

What was wrong with this dish? First of all, I will remember when I next cook this to turn the bird upside so that when diners dig into it, they will end up with a spoonful of duck skin, meat and some 'jewels'. This was served with the breast facing down, I think, so the first round for all of us was just skin and jewels. Because it wasn't particularly tasty, or because we were too full by then, nobody went for a second helping. The jewels in the duck were also not my kind of jewels. I didn't count the number of jewels, most of which were lotus seeds, cashew nuts (instead of chestnuts) and pork. I sure didn't taste any Chinese ham. But what really put us off was the ducky smell. I know it wouldn't be a duck without that smell, but it was quite strong and offensive. It reminded me of my goose down pillows which gave me horrible nights of imsomnia until I threw them away.

The total bill came to RM367/US$100 only, which was very cheap since the meal was for 12 diners. Winner doesn't add any tax or charge so rush there before they do. I will be back, but I will stick to certain dishes only.

Winner Hotel
Level 1
Kampung Air
Tel: (088) 243 224