Wong Kwok's Poon Choi

WKR's poon choi, RM388+, doesn't include rice but includes a bowl of msg-laced herbal soup.

Another poon choi (basin dish), this one by Wong Kwok Restaurant (WKR). Seafood lovers will prefer WKR's poon choi to Fisherman Seafood Restaurant (FSR)'s because there's fish, prawns, pacific clams, scallops, sea cucumbers (in big chunks, unlike the nearly invisible ones at FSR), fish maw, fish skin and fish balls. There's also a pork knuckle (the only 'serious' meat) but it was so hard I couldn't cut it with my metal spoon, a few pieces of plain white cut chicken if you are lucky to find them, mushrooms, winter melon, bean curd skin, mung bean noodles and broc.

By the time we got through 1/4 of the bowl, everything was mixed up because WKR's poon choi was too soupy. Taste-wise it was fine at first but got boring because everything was coated with the gooey soup and tasted boiled, like they just cooked everything in the gooey soup. There were also so many different ingredients the dish became "lap chap", a term meaning hodgepodge, in a negative way.  I much prefer FSR's poon choi even though it didn't have as many varieties. A relative from Hong Kong dining with us said that the poon choi he ate in a village in HK was drier, with rows and layers of chicken, duck, prawns, a large portion of kou rou/kiew nyuk and plenty of white radish. Sounds more like FSR's poon choi.


FSR's poon choi, RM388 net, includes rice but no soup. There's plenty of meat, and they are not all boiled. The prawns have been fried, the duck roasted, the oysters stewed and the chicken boiled and it tasted like corn-fed chicken.