Zhuge Liang Restaurant

We were in the Jalan Besar area and decided to check out Zhuge Liang Restaurant, specialising in Sichuanese kaoyu (literally, barbecued fish). The difference here is that the fish is cooked in two steps: barbecued first, then simmered in a spicy broth at the table. It’s quite unlike the usual idea of a barbecue. Here, it’s done fairly well and in a pretty mild broth compared to its competitors in other parts of town. We ordered the patin fish ($38) and had it done pao jiao (literally, soaked peppers) style and wondered how spicy it’d be. Not that much, because it turned out that pao jiao meant brined peppers, which mellowed the spice a great deal. The fish was smooth textured and tasty, and the broth was full of leek, cucumber and celery. We added some tang oh vegetables ($2) to complete the dish.

We also ordered some chicken ($18) to complete the meal. This one is called the tao yuan xiong di lian (literally, peach garden brotherhood), which was skewers of chicken and soft bone in a far spicier sauce than the fish. It too came in a hotpot of sorts, this time not in a broth but a spicy sauce. If only the fish had been in this sauce, I’d’ve liked it so much better! Still, the chicken was done very nicely, the soft bone gave a surprisingly moreish texture to the skewers, half-chewy and half-crunchy, which I liked.

To wash everything down, we had a very light Harbin beer ($6) that came ice cold and rounded off the meal nicely.

Be warned, though, that this restaurant has no English menu and the (very attentive and lovely) wait staff are from PRC, I doubt they speak English. Ask for the menu with pictures if your Chinese isn’t up to scratch. The staff were super sweet and accommodating in trying to make sure the food was to our taste and the standard of service was one of the best I’ve had in a long time, notwithstanding the feeling that we were in China. I say that eating in a place that reminds me of China restaurants isn’t a bad thing at all.

Zhuge Liang Restaurant
27 Foch Road #01-02 Hoa Nam Building
Tel: +65 6396 8858

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Yang Gui Fei

We discovered this little restaurant while wandering around Chinatown looking for a quick dinner.  I liked the gentle pun in the name, as the character for Yang was “sheep” instead of  the usual character for the legendary Chinese consort’s surname. Yang Gui Fei specialises in Xi’an cuisine, and is run by Xi An people. We only seemed to hear mainland Chinese accents from the other patrons and had high hopes that the food would be authentic!

As per our usual practice, we ordered a bit more than expected, starting off with some typical Chinese cold starters, such as these pickled long beans.  When they first arrived, I was a bit dismayed by how bland and faded they looked. But looks belay much flavour and zing. The beans were refreshingly spicy and sour,  plus fermentation did wonders to add to its flavour. They were super yummy and also deceptively spicy – on first bite, they were mildly hot but the more I ate the hotter my mouth got and I couldn’t eat more than two in a row before having to cool off my mouth with something else.

We also had a plate of seasoned enoki mushrooms, similar in its savoury umami seasoning, just not pickled and only mildly spicy. They were a good interlude between bites of beans!

The star dish of this place had to be the mutton. We ordered the mutton kebabs and also tried out a few chicken ones. These were well-marinated, but the chicken kebabs were definitely juicier and more flavourful than the mutton ones. The mutton ones unfortunately don’t quite match up to what I remember in Xi’an. It all became clear when the proprietress told us that they used New Zealand lamb and not proper grown-up and gamey mutton. Maybe they should change to a Muslim supplier from Tekka market and make it truly Muslim-style like in Xi’an.

Here’s a close up on the spice mix that goes into the marinade.   Yum!

The next dish we ordered brought back fond memories from my holiday in Xi An.  “Biang Biang” noodles are thick, flat and very chewy noodles seasoned with a spicy  vinegary dipping sauce. The texture of these noodles are far from the usual slightly limp and soft Chinese noodles. They are the epitome of al dente yet are nothing like any Italian noodle. I don’t know what type of flour they used nor how they developed the gluten in the noodles to get this lovely firm noodle with loads of bite . It was wonderful.Word of warning:  one bowl of “Bian Bian” noodles is plenty for two.

Yang Gui Fei restaurant
18 Smith Street
Tel: 6100 0629

Chongqing Grilled Fish

DC found out about Chongqing Grilled Fish on Facebook when he noticed that a friend was a fan. Intrigued, he looked it up and found that it had quite a following. So there we were on a Sunday night to try it out, this time with my parents. It’s a typically China-type place run by PRCs and the menu reminded me quite a bit of the casual little places that dot Shanghai. We started with the cold cucumber with garlic, which I thought was quite decent. Mum’s used to much finer stuff in China, so she wasn’t too impressed by this rendition. My standards are obviously lower, so I ate most of it.

It was the kou shui ji (saliva chicken) that didn’t come up to my standards this time. I’d spent a little while in Chengdu and Chongqing, and had really good Sichuan cuisine in Shanghai, and this version is but a pale imitation. By Singapore standards, however, it’s passable. It’s got a fairly fiery sauce atop tender chicken. What was missing was the numbing sensation from Sichuan peppercorns. A pity as it could’ve been much nicer!

I thought the dongpo rou (braised pork belly) was pretty good. Dad showed his concurrence by walloping so much of it that DC hardly had a chance. Yes, China makes better, but this comes close. They used leaner pork than the norm in China, which is always a good thing, and braised it nicely so the meat fell apart easily in the mouth. Yum.

Next was the three-egg spinach, again quite decent but nothing particularly special. It’s not a hard dish to get right.

And now the piece de resistance! The preceding dishes on their own wouldn’t quite have made it to this blog, but the fish just blew me out of the water. It came piping hot over a charcoal brazier, fish already grilled and cooked through. It was covered in the xiang la (fragrant and spicy) sauce and accompanied by beansprouts and celery. We ordered some extra vegetables to cook in the gravy and boy was it excellent. First, the fish somehow never got rough-textured from being overcooked. It was tender to the end. The sauce, true to its name, was spicy and fragrant and the teeniest bit numbing, which I miss a lot from that few days I spent in Sichuan. The charcoal kept the dish warm and cooked the extra vegetables gently so all the flavour from the sauce permeated through. I also liked how there was enough oil in the dish to give the classic Sichuanese slow burn of heat. At first I thought the dish wasn’t quite as spicy as I expected and I made a mental note to order one level up the next time (we ordered the least spicy version). But as I ate and ate (and ate) and slurped up the gravy, I found my mouth getting hotter and hotter, until at the end I was sniffing and almost gasping from the heat. This is a definite must-eat. I’m coming back again soon!

Chongqing Grilled Fish
18 Mosque Street #01-01
Tel: 6225 0087

Layang Layang: First Approach

We flew to Layang Layang via Kota Kinabalu by chartered plane. It was a cute little propeller plane and in much better condition than the ones I flew in The Philippines and Indonesia. Nonetheless, we still had to go a bit snap-happy!

We could see the pilots very clearly through the open cabin and were very amused watching them go through their pre-flight checks and put on their own seat belts.

We flew over the beautiful outlying islands off KK…

… flying low enough to see our own shadow in the pretty turquoise waters below.

It was then followed by nothing but blue water for a while, until the pilots announced that we’d reached Layang Layang and that they would bank the plane to let us have a good view of the atoll island. It was great flying a chartered plane! Not only were they patient enough to wait for us to finish the touristy photo-taking before takeoff, they also gave us a good few turns of the island to take pictures to our hearts content.

You can just about see the shape of the atoll in this picture, together with the lagoon formed in the middle.

The resort is on this thick bit of the atoll that has definitely been reclaimed. There’s the air strip, the resort and the Malaysian air base and nothing else.

The rest of the atoll isn’t really much of an island, with quite a lot of it underwater most times of the day.

It was a lovely place smack in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but sea and sky stretching out as far as the eye could see.

It was especially beautiful at sunset with wide panaromas of coloured sky throwing their colours onto white clouds…

… as well as casuarinas and hardy tropical pines silhouetted beautifully against the setting sun.

We went on sunset walks before dinner when we weren’t completely knackered from the diving to take in as much as we could.

Inside the very charming resort, we found different sea creatures in the room. Some days we had angelfish, other days a turtle, and on one special day, we had a pair of manta rays come visit!

And on the last day of diving, a hammerhead came to visit us. It was so sweet of the resort staff to put in special touches like these to make our day even better.

More to come soon on the diving!

August in China: Pasteurised Hands and Little Fat Lambs

There was a cleaning station at the entrance of one of the higher quality restaurants our relatives took us to. I was incredibly amused by the request to pasteurise my hands.

As I dispensed the happy juice, I was relieved that water at 70°C didn’t spurt out and bathe my hands for 5 minutes! Hee.

In other stories, I treated my uncles to dinner at Xiao Fei Yang (Little Fat Lamb) the night before we flew back home. This place specialises in hotpot and has a few flavours to choose from. We chose the herbal chicken and the mala flavours. True to usual form, we over ordered. Between the three of us, we had so much food that the restaurant had to provide a side table to cram everything in!

Here’s me and First Uncle before the food fest started. I guess at this point you’d want to know how it tasted. Of course it was good, if not why would I post it? I’m going to leave you to track down a branch when you next go to China!

August in China: The Box Factory

One of our relatives in the village has a share in a cardboard box factory. No surprise it’s in the area seeing as Dongguan is one of the largest industrial cities in China. I heard rumours that Dongguan is the world’s largest producer of shoes. So many shoes probably means a big demand for my relative’s boxes then.

First we saw the bales of paper. There’s First Uncle going “it’s this high!”

Then the requisite group photo.

The bales are then unstacked and gotten ready for processing into cardboard.

The sheets are glued together to formed the corrugated board and then cut by this lean mean machine.

I realise that I never got to see any boxes at all. Perhaps it made just cardboard and didn’t assemble them into boxes. I don’t know for sure. What I do know is that I quite like this gloomy shot of the factory interior.

August in China: My Mother’s Ancestral Village

It just happened that my uncles were in the area as they were going back to the ancestral village. I planned my trip so that I could go have a look too. My mother’s ancestral village of Caotun has now been swallowed up by Dongguan, a major industrial city, and is more suburb than village. Still, everyone in this area has the same surname and is related in some way. (In case you’re wondering: no they didn’t marry their cousins, they just went to the next village or so to look for a wife. At least that was what happened in the old days.)

Here I am at the local vegetable patch. My uncles somehow took it into their heads that as a city girl I had to acquaint myself with it. So yes, vegetable patch, meet me; me, meet vegetable patch.

Now this is where things get slightly more interesting. Here’s the local village hall. I’m posing with my Third Uncle…

… and then with my First Uncle.

And why is it interesting? There’s a roll of honour here for people who donate to the hall. Here I am pointing at my great aunt’s name.

And here is one of the pair of stone lions my grandfather donated.

Somehow this tiny village has two halls. My grandfather donated to this one too and here I am tiptoe-ing to show you his name.

And finally in my grandfather’s house, there’s the family columbarium of sorts. It’s maintained by our relatives who still live here. One of the old ladies still climbs up to this room pretty regularly to light joss sticks and offer fruit. From left to right, I think the ashes are of (unknown), great aunt, great grandmother, grandfather, and other less direct relatives. For some of them I couldn’t even make out who it is from the markings on the urn.

It was quite an experience to see what might have been had my grandparents not moved out to Singapore in those early days. I guess this is part of what they mean when they talk of finding one’s roots.

August in China: Modern-Day Chaozhou

I wasn’t sure what to expect in Chaozhou. In my mind, Chaozhou has an almost mythical quality, more so than Xiamen. For the Hokkiens have the entire Fujian province as a spiritual home while the Teochews have only the city Chaozhou for theirs. Sure, nearby Shantou speaks Teochew as well but to the overseas Chinese in me, it doesn’t really count. (For those unfamiliar with the local terms, Chaozhou is pronounced Teochew in the local dialect of the same name and Fujian is said Hokkien, again in their local dialect Hokkien.)

There wasn’t much on Chaozhou in my guidebook, so I contented myself with a quick four-hour pitstop in between Hakka country and Guangzhou. I spent most of my time exploring the crumbling streets around the Anping Lu area. Here the houses set along zigzagging alleys dated to the Ming dynasty. It was fun to spot little details yet untouched by restoration for the tourists. As usual, the old seedy area was much more interesting than the prettier but less characterful area under restoration just streets away.

I wandered the backalleys which often turned into people’s backyards, surreptitiously taking shots of, well, everyday life.

Here, it didn’t seem like time passed very fast at all. This scene of the crumbling tile and rusty bicycle to me fits fine even a hundred years back.

I liked how traditions still ran strong here, with freshly calligraphed couplets adorning the courtyard door.

Here’s another surreptitious shot, this time of old-timers at their usual practice session. Two of them are playing the erhu (a two-stringed instrument vaguely similar to a violin) and a yangqing (conceptually somewhat like a piano). It was great standing at a respectful distance just watching and listening.

The bridge was the last stop before I turned back to the bus station to catch my coach. I think this could be Xiangzi Qiao which was apparently built in the 12th century. Too bad it was crumbling and not particularly attractive, plus had some kind of exorbitant entrance fee (as usual). I turned around and strolled back past the atmospheric streets I’d just finished exploring, slowly savouring the sights and sounds (for free!) all the way back to the bus station.

August in China: On the Road in Hakka Country

The next morning,  I got to the bus terminus by hiring a motorbike taxi, riding pillion for about half an hour in the early morning to catch the first bus out. It was lovely watching the countryside wake up, seeing villagers on their way to the fields and catching fleeting glimpses of the first stalls to open in the little towns dotting the winding road. The first stalls were invariably meat stalls taking advantage of the cool morning to quickly sell their stock before it went bad in the fierce heat of the day.

And at yet another chaotic town junction masquerading as a bus terminus, I pressed onwards.

But not before sampling some local breakfast. Here, breakfast started looking slightly familiar yet not quite the same. These fat rice noodles were called laoshu ban or mouse noodles, most likely named after mouse tails. These tasted somewhat like the Singaporean laoshu fen but were of course much more rustic (a euphemism for “coarse”). The topping was pretty normal, pork balls and minced pork together. Of course, this isn’t the regular breakfast as I’d upsized it by adding more meat balls. Normal people have only noodles and a tiny sprinkling of minced meat on top.

Having fortified myself with Hakka msg-laden noodles, I was ready to head into Teochew territory for more msg-laden food.

August in China: Life in a Tulou

Despite the gawking tourists, life goes in as usual inside a tulou. People move in and out of the place, though I suspect more out than in given the lures of big city lights for the young ‘uns.

Young and old still work at the main cash crop of the area, green tea.

They pick through the dried leaves that come out of special tea leaf dryers.

They also raise rather cute but slightly feral puppies. These puppies were gamboling about merrily by the tulou well until a villager walked over with some bloody off cuts of meat and casually tossed it at them. Predictably, the puppies tore at the meat with great gusto. I’d taken out my camera to shoot the meat fest but by the time it turned on and focussed, all the meat was gone and all that was left was five puppies with bloody mouths. They looked at me rather hopefully but I was afraid to pet them lest they think my hand was round two of lunch!

In another part of the tulou lay some cuddly creatures on the other end of the equation. I’m sure these cute white bunnies weren’t raised purely for the kids’ enjoyment. They were mighty adorable though. I wonder how the villagers cook them!