Sushi Tei--Lunch

I've been to the newly-opened Sushi Tei 5 times last month and I must say it is the best Japanese restaurant in KK although to be honest, I've not been to any of the Sushi Kings yet. The restaurant is very pleasant, with a light wood-accented interior and a view of the sea which made me felt that I was in Singapore rather than small city KK. The sushi train is in the center of the room and the banquette seats, which are cosy and private, are set around the periphery of the restaurant.


Karaage chicken, yummy.


Yakitori, RM9/USD3, disappointing because the chicken was overcooked and tough. This will be the last time I order grilled meat in a non-kushiyaki restaurant.


Soft-shell crab rolls, RM8/USD2.60.


Unagi (eel) rolls, RM8/USD2.60.


Fried udon. I didn't like this because I had better (in Genoa, Italy, of all places). I didn't like the canned tuna and the taste of what I think was ponzu sauce instead of regular light soy sauce.


Cod with cod roe, RM26.90/USD8.80. This was very expensive by any standard because it was a tiny, real tiny piece. But it was VERY good--soft, moist and tasty. Still, I wouldn't order this again unless E who paid for this lunch does it again.


Garlic fried rice, RM8/USD2.60. All the Japanese restaurants get this dish right, don't they.


Chocolate-coated strawberry ice cream, gorgeous because the strawberry flavor (real, no coloring too) was so good but they were the size of choc truffles and cost RM11/USD3.60 for 6.




The reasons why this restaurant has taken the town (the queue is long especially for dinner) and my kids, who have been there 10 times in one month, by storm are because the variety is wide (especially the sushi of course), the quality is above all the other Japanese restaurants in town (udon noodles are not dried packets noodles, rice is short-grain, plates are ceramics not plastic) and the yearly membership (get it before they close it) gives you 10 % discount on all meals (20% discount five days before and after your birthday) and coupons worth RM180 for the membership fee of RM99. Btw, the membership form is racist racial--it requires you to fill in your race, like some of those weird forms we have that require you to fill in your religion, so I wrote 'N/R' on it. Come on, what's race got to do with a restaurant membership form? Malaysia Boleh.

I wasn't impressed with Sushi Tei, Vivo Vity, Singapore because Singapore has some of the best Japanese restaurants in SE Asia, maybe even Asia. But in KK, well, Sushi Tei shines above the rest. My only complain is that the portions are stingy (read: expensive) but then that's always the case with Japanese food. You want cute and miniature, you get it at Japanese restaurants. Btw, Sushi Tei KK's chawan mushi is too firm, unlike the one at Vivo City, which was perfect. I had Sushi Tei KK's chawan mushi twice and both times they failed to please me.

Next up is "Dinner at Sushi Tei", that is if my son remembers to upload all the photos from the memory card he accidentally brought to Melbourne, leaving me with nothing to blog about.

Sushi Tei
Lot G-68, Ground Floor,
Suria Sabah Shopping Mall
Kota Kinabalu

Tel:(088) 485 595

Party Play, Lintas

My wish has come true. Now there's a place for sandwiches worthy for my alimentary canal. There aren't any good delis in this big town small city and the only places for a decent sandwich are the 5-star hotels where a sandwich with drinks can set you back by RM50/USD16.40.

Party Play has come to the rescue, with set meals at RM12.90/USD4.20 which can be a sandwich or pasta or curry that comes with a small salad, a dessert and a drink. I've been to PP twice this month and each time my craving was for their sandwich set.


PP's very delicious sandwich is loaded and large enough to feed two small eaters. The set sandwich comes with a nice Caesar salad but a better replacement (which they allow) is PP's house salad, which is loaded with pine nuts and other goodies and a divine dressing. Pity though that the salad greens are finely cut up and confined to a small bowl, making them soggy.  PP's baguettes are extremely crispy-crusty and thin-skinned; they remind me of Spanish flat baguettes, unlike the thick-skinned baguettes in many hotels (Hyatt for example), which are made for prehistoric men with sharpened canines. PP's baguettes are for tai tais.


Creamy mushroom pasta, very tasty. I stand corrected by MG, who said the cream was too runny and she's right. I only had two bites of my friend's pasta.


Sticky date pudding, RM10/USD3.30. Hmm. This one's tricky. While the flavor's great, I'm not sure about the texture, which was sticky, gummy and very much like a pudding. You know how it's like with first great  impressions of food/boyfriends/dogs: you measure all subsequent ones against them. My first sticky date pudding was warm and cake-like and I think that's the way I like it.


The set meals came with green tea tiramisu which all my friends enjoyed but which I thought was just okay. I'm suddenly tired of the wet soft texture of tiramisu. But I do like PP's desserts. Quality. Taste. Simple presentation (that's a mini macaron on the tiramisu). Affordable. I also liked that their desserts are not too sweet. I'm making this my regular lunch joint.

Party Play
Lot 21-0
Lorong Lintas Plaza 3,
Lintas Plaza, 88300
Kota Kinabalu

--to locals, this means PP is diagonally across from Bake With Me. You should know where that is.

Tel: 088 218 210

p.s. PP's set lunches are value for money. Otherwise, expect to pay as much as other western restaurants.

Chicken, Tofu Bok and Glass Noodles Stew

Chicken, Tofu bok and glass noodles stew.

Casseroles are easy for times when all you want is to just feed the brood. No fancy elaborate dishes, just plain one-pot feeds all, from stove to table, very no-fuss cooking and serving. Saves on money, time and washing up too.

Here's a Shanghainese stew that you can cook ahead upto Step 3, although it's not necessary because the cooking prep and time are short. Add the glass noodles when re-heating and voila, a meal. You can serve some stir-fried greens to balance the diet or better still, serve it with a hearty soup. It doesn't look impressive but is very tasty. In my family, the glass noodles and tofu bok ( deep-fried spongy tofu balls) are finished before the chicken and it's no wonder because all the flavor and sauce are absorbed by the noodles and the boks. Try it and tell me what you think.



Chicken, Tofu Bok N Glass Noodles Stew

1/2 chicken (500 gm) or about 3 whole chicken legs, chopped into serving-sized pieces*
2 packets tofu bok (about 20 boks)
a large handful of dried mung bean/glass noodles, soaked & drained
2 slices of ginger
2 large stalks of spring onions, washed and tied in a bundle
3 to 4 T light soy sauce
2 T shaoxin hua tiao wine
1 piece rock sugar, about 1 teaspoon
1 T veg oil
2 to 3 cups water plus 1/2 chicken stock cube or 2 to 3 cups chicken stock (plus extra, if necessary)--the dish should be quite soupy

* in Chinese cooking, the chicken skin is not removed because it adds to the flavor and keeps the flesh moist.

1. Boil a small pot of water. Switch off and add the tofu boks, pushing them down with a wooden spoon. Cover and let soak for 3 to 5 minutes. Drain away the water and rinse with tap water. Squeeze out all the water gently. This step is done to remove as much oil as possible from the boks.

2. Heat up a clay or glass pot or an ordinary heavy-based pot and add 1 T oil. Put in the spring onions and ginger and fry for 1 minute. Add the chicken pieces, turning them over until they shrink and turn white.

3. Add the soy sauce, salt, cooking wine, rock sugar and water + stock cube or chicken stock. Cover the pot. When the liquid boils, add the boks, stir well and reduce the heat to low until the liquid just bubbles. Once in a while, stir to make sure the chicken or boks don't burn.

4. When the chicken is tender (about 25 minutes), add the mung bean noodles. Taste and season with more soy sauce or wine or sugar if necessary. If there's not enough liquid, add more. Depending on preference, this dish can be very soupy or not. The noodles are very absorbent.

Serve hot with rice.

One More Shanghai Lunch.

I met a young architect recently who works in Shanghai and his advice to my daughter is "Go north, to Shanghai! SH is at the forefront of the economic boom in China and since she's lucky enough to be in a profession that takes her places, SH is the place!  The city's energy, the thousands of young professionals from all over the world, the upbeat lifestyle, the opportunities...I missed SH in its glory days in the 30s and I'm lucky to be there in its second boom. Tell her not to miss it!"

While I'm not sure about the working life in SH, I'm very sure that there's no shortage of excellent food in that city. Everywhere you turn are bustling restaurants offering hundreds of dishes, making ordering an agonizing decision. In China, forget about Chinese chain restaurants unless you want crappy food. Ditto too, with the little holes-in-the-walls restaurants. Head for air-conditioned modern restaurants where you can eat like a king without risking your mortgage instalments. The quality and variety are reasons why Chinese food is one of the top three cuisines of the world (my  two oldest kids rate it The Best). Look at this lunch in a restaurant on the Pudong side of Wai Tan (The Bund):

First the cold dishes:


A combination plate of cold cut--pork tongue, pork shoulder--in chili oil and garlic.


A spiced aspic of pork.


Another unbelievably delicious dish of tender beef cubes.


Smoked pork slices. Chinese are serious pork lovers.


A tower of vegan imitation duck.


Korfu is Shanghainese style wheat gluten balls. The spongy dough balls were braised in a delicious sauce of soy sauce, wine and spices and each mouthful burst with flavor, taste and bite.

If you aren't still convinced about the food, watch out. The hot dishes:


Mouth-watering mini pork chops, crispy-tender to the bite.


Sandwiched between pillow-soft mini buns.


Another yummy dish of Chinese salted seasoned pork, prawns, duck...It was like a mini poon choi.


A large pot of goodies, like a soupy poon choi, in a delicious soup. Not as luxurious as the Prime Minister's Pot, which is a soup of a whole chicken, a whole fresh pork knuckle and a whole knuckle of ham, but wonderfully delicious (I'm running out of adjectives).


After all the meat, a veg dish is a good change and instead of a boring plate of fried greens, this was a dish of fresh straw mushrooms (one of my fave mushrooms, available in summer in China and HK) and a Shanghai veg, cooked in 'superior' broth.


Stir-fired pea sprouts with some mysterious meat.


Peking duck, delicious beyond words.



I've met many Caucasians who've never eaten duck before and it was love at first bite for them. But there's a bird that tastes even better than duck. It's goose. And for that nobody does it better than the cooks in Hong Kong. I haven't eaten roasted goose in southern China but since roasted goose is a Cantonese dish, they should do it just as good there too. Don't die until you have eaten roasted goose.


Pumpkin puffs.






View from the restaurant of the 'western' side of Wai Tan.

Nanling Restaurant, Shanghai

Here's a post on one of the most memorable lunches I had in Shanghai last October. The hosts were the Fang sisters, whose father, like Uncle Ma, and my FIL were childhood friends and university mates. The meal was especially memorable because the food was absolutely delicious and our hosts had ordered most of the restaurant's top popular dishes, a total of 20 dishes including two desserts! By the end of the meal, I was ready to go home and lie down, unable to move from over-eating. It was almost painful when we were reminded that we had a dinner invitation that same day. We knew that Shanghainese were serious when it came to being hospitable. This was the meal that made me consider bulimia as a way to cope, but of course it was just a fleeting thought.

Nanling Restaurant occupies a renovated mansion (168 Yueyang Lu) which in the roaring 1920s was home to opera artistes. The mansion seemed lacking in upkeep compared to the modern upscale restaurants now teeming in Shanghai but this is where the locals come to eat, and the food at Nanling is favored by older folks who want their Huaiyang food the old school way.

First the 8 cold dishes:


Jelly fish 'head'--tender, crunchy and delicious, the 'heads' are much better than regular jelly fish. The bite is very different from regular jelly fish.


Pork in aspic tasted like ham. Refreshing.


Lotus root stuffed with glutinous rice in osmanthus sauce was delicate and yummy.


Spring onions and oil on boiled chicken was very good, the chicken full of flavor.


Squid in a delicious soy sauce.


'Sween yu' is a highly fragrant fish that's fried and soaked in a sauce made with soy sauce, crystal sugar, wine and star anise. My MIL does this dish very well.


Potato salad, Russian-style, is perhaps influenced by those days in the 1930s when Shanghai was the 'Paris of the East'.


I've forgotten what this was, but it's likely it was lamb.

Now the 10 hot dishes:


Eel in soy sauce--I get uneasy eating eel so I had only one piece of this. It was good, very tender and sweet.


Gunxi tang, a popular Shanghainese soup of bean curd, winter bamboo and Chinese ham. The old folks complained that the bean curd strips were too fine and gave a different feel on the tongue. I nodded and learnt, trusting their taste buds which have been seasoned through  decades of eating the best food.


Crystal prawns, so-called because they are seasoned to be almost transparent, or translucent, and are very crunchy.

 Peking duck is usually served as crispy duck skin wrapped in a pancake with scallion strips and a thick hoisin sauce. Nanling serves their Peking duck skin with some meat on. Yumm... just the way I like it.


Of all the dishes, I was most awed by this: lion heads. Nanling's Yangzhou lion heads with prawn roe are braised in a superior soup while Shanghainese lion heads are braised in a wine and soy sauce. The meatballs were also different in that the fat was not chopped with the meat but rather they seemed to have been cooked and cut into bits and mixed into the meat, so that you can taste the butter-soft fat bits on your tongue. To this day, I think about this dish and I know this is what I'll eat on my next trip to Shanghai. Absolutely heavenly, a gorgeous dish.


 'Little dragon buns' give a mouthful of delicious soup that's not to be wasted so you have to be careful not to break the buns before popping them into your mouth.


A delicious stir-fry of fish maw and crab meat.


Another dish that makes you wonder if you're in heaven. This was a special fish cooked with a super delicious sauce.


One of the simplest but absolutely delicious greens, doe miao which is the tender tip of the pea sprouts.


There are many versions of fen jen rou ('flour steamed meat') and Nanling's version wraps the meat in lotus leaves. Another yum dish but I was weary by then.


But wait, what was this? I thought that the transparent bits were water chestnuts but when I put one into my mouth, there was no crunch and instead, the 'chestnut' just melted in my mouth. I was astounded and took another bite, just to feel the 'chestnut' melting in my mouth again. The other diners knew what they were eating and didn't have a stupid look on their faces like I did.  My host graciously explained that this was steamed cake with pork fat. The fat is not ordinary pork belly fat.  Pork caul (what I used to call omentum) is a net-like piece of transparent membrane with bits of white fat here and there. The fat bits are painstakingly cut out from the membrane for this cake.

Something this special needed more attention so although I had food running out of my ears, I reached out for a whole piece of the steamed cake and bit into it, savoring everything about it, the texture, the flavor, the taste, the experience of eating something new and unusual. The other diners had given up eating and I had the whole plate of pork fat cake to myself. I didn't disappoint them because I ate another piece, three pieces in all. I said a silent prayer for my heart (and thighs). The cake was subtle in taste but was soft, delicate and exquisite. Wow.


Shanghai pancake was greasy but so tasty.

An excellent meal full of variety that included all the top Huaiyang dishes. Very well done, Fang Sisters.