Halal Steamboat BBQ in JB

There are quite a number of Steamboat BBQ restaurants in Johor Bahru today that are operated by Muslims. You know... the type where you pay a single-cost per person all you can eat until your tummy is totally full and you don't waste food by taking too much on your plate because you think you can eat everything and end up not cooking the extra stuff that you took and run the risk of being charged for the excess at RM5 per 100g. So don't be greedy...

I have been to a number of these places, some of which I discovered from food blogs while some were simply spotted while driving past a particular place. These restaurants are typically located in shophouses in the many new housing areas that have sprouted all over JB city. They are of budget standard... not to be compared with the likes of Seoul Garden but good enough for a simple family dinner if you have kids with huge appetites.

Making comparisons among the many steamboat restaurants is quite easy really... because they all fall under the concept of own cooking and grilling. I judge them on the following aspects :

• The spread and variety of the fresh and frozen food selection. This normally consist of the customary meat cuts (beef, mutton and chicken), seafood and shellfish (fish, prawns, squids, crabs, mussels, cockles), vegetables (kailan, cauliflower, bell peppers, kangkong) and the yong-taufu stuff (bean curd, fishballs, meatballs, crab-sticks etc.). Most places offer some form of noodles and rice vermicelli. Plain rice and fried rice are also normally available.
• The tastiness of the broth. Most places nowadays offer two types : tom-yam soup and chicken soup. They now have boiling pots with two compartments so that you can have both soups.
• The choice of drinks. Generally the drinks on offer are two or three types of squash-cordial drinks. Some offer carbonated drinks dispensed from those fizzy machines. Most places offer hot drinks but at extra charge.
• The choice of sauces. The good restaurants offer three or four tasty homemade sauces.
• The seating arrangement and general restaurant layout. Since the cook-your-own-food concept will involve a lot of walking to and fro the food counters, a good layout would be very convenient, especially when the dinner crowd is large.

To date, me and my family have tried eating at five (5) such steamboat & grill restaurants, and they are :

1. D'Terrace BBQ Steamboat. Located at Jalan Md Amin in the Kolam Air area of JB. RM20.90 per pax, the last time we went there over a year ago.
2. Kapten Steamboat & Grill, located in a new shophouse block near the State Education Department at Jalan Tasik Utara. When it first opened last year, they charged a fixed price per person. Nowadays they charge based on a fixed set menu, which sort of takes away the fun.
3. Otai Steamboat & Grill at Larkin Impian, near the Larkin Stadium.RM19.00 per pax.
4. Steamboat & Grill Cottage at Taman Austin Perdana, not far from Sultan Ismail Hospital in Pandan. The published price was RM17.50 per pax, but when I paid the bill I noted the hidden charge of the wet towels added to the total.
5. Tropika Steamboat & BBQ at Taman Setia Tropika in Kempas, near the new Home Ministry complex. RM18.80 per person.

The last one on the list above was the latest one we tried and which I would recommend. They have a somewhat limited spread of meats but a reasonable variety of seafood and shellfish. The vegetables and frozen stuff is quite varied. Both the tom-yam and chicken soup have a thick taste, not the thin watery stuff at some other places.

Actually, the thing that make me like this place has nothing to do with taste. It's the crockery... they use quality Claytan stoneware plates and bowls. Most of the other places use cheap melamine plates which get deformed when exposed to the heat of the grill stove. Bent and distorted plates really take away a lot of the good impression of a restaurant.

If there is a single minus point that I may say of Tropika Steamboat is that they only have two sauces ; a homemade black pepper sauce and a commercially produced chilli sauce. Perhaps when I have become a regular customer of this place, I might drop a hint or two to the owner.

Okay then.... that's my post for `Another Good Makan Spot in JB - Part 5'.

The boys do most of the grilling

Coolers where the foodstuff are

Stove placed on a thick marble tile to protect the table

Al Qamar

The full moon as captured tonight Tuesday 07.02.12

Blessed is He who has placed in the sky great stars and placed therein a (burning) lamp and luminous moon - Surah Al-Furqan : Verse 61.

Real old school

The boarding school that I went to, MRSM Kuantan, is 38-years old this year. Not quite as old as some of the more established boarding schools in our country but reasonably old when you consider that the first generation of students who came out of that place have passed the half-century mark in terms of age. And to further to illustrate this point on successive generations, two of my former classmates have/had children study at this same school.

1975 photo of a partially completed school. Pic lifted from Capt Norhisham Kassim's FB.

Maktab Rendah Sains MARA Kuantan, to give the school its full name, took in the first batch of students in 1974. The school facilities were not fully completed at that time but MARA pressed on and the us students persevered. The first intake of students, now known as Kuatagh Pioneers, were all boys. I guess they wanted to make sure the school was at least decently ready before bringing in the girls. The second batch who registered the following year had a mix of both boys and girls. You can imagine the excitement of the seniors at having younger sisters to watch over... you know, teenage puberty and adolescent hormones :-)

I enrolled at MRSM Kuantan in 1978 at the 4th Form level, so I am considered as the second batch, with K79 being our alumni identification number (1979 being the year we took our MCE/SPM exams). In the short two years I was there, I have plenty of memories, both good and bad. But we should not dwell on the bad for too long... better to think of the happy events and experiences that helped shape what we are today. All of us have moved on in our lives. Some of us are pretty successful in their respective careers while some are doing okay. But this disparity in achievement has never prevented any of us to reunite and have some coffee together. Whenever some of us meet up for a specific occasion, it is always happy chatting about stories of those mischievous years, of carefree days and youthful adventures. And then we would ask about some of our friends who've been missing... if anyone knows where this particular he or she is, or what he/she is doing today.

In 1979 when we were in Form 5, there were 121 of us who took the MCE/SPM exams, 34 girls and 87 guys. Although most of us regularly meet and do keep in touch, there are still a number of our friends whose whereabouts are unknown. Understandably, some of them prefer to remain isolated... and we respect such decisions, but we still harbour hope of at least knowing a piece of news that he/she is alive somewhere. This is important because we are brothers and sisters. Of the 121 total, seven of our batch have been called by the Almighty. These are the ones that we know... it could be more.

I am thinking of my K79 brothers and sisters at this moment because a reunion is being held for today and tomorrow at our old school in Kuantan. Unfortunately, I am not able to make it to the event although I very much want to. The last similar occasion I attended was the Aidilfitri reunion in 2010. I hear that the turnout may be larger this time, with some friends turning up after being MIA for 33 years.

This event is actually the 37th anniversary of enrolment of the second batch at MRSM Kuantan but the ocassion is not to celebrate the 37 years, rather the fact that Batch No. 2 students are 50-years old this year. This is somewhat a continuation of the effort by our seniors who held their reunion at the school last year. Whether this trend will continue with the K80 batch, we'll have to wait for next year.

To all my brothers and sisters who are in the old school today and tomorrow, do have a wonderful time catching up with each other. Don't embarrass yourselves in front of our younger brothers and sisters (who'd most probably call you pakcik and makcik). Take care and I love you all.

Interlude

I hope I won't get kicked by my friend Versedanggerik for this...

Three kicks


A lawyer was out shooting and shot a duck. As he was about to pick it up, a farmer appeared. "This is my land", said the farmer, "so that is my duck".


"I shot it," said the lawyer. "That means it is my duck and I will sue you to prove it."


"Round here, we don’t hold with court cases," said the farmer. "We go by the Three Kicks Law. I kick you three times; and if you can get back on your feet and kick me three times, the duck is yours."


The lawyer, reckoning he could kick far harder than any farmer, said: "Fair enough." So the farmer kicked him once in the knee, then in the ribs and finally in the groin. "All right," groaned the lawyer, stumbling back on his feet, "now it's my turn."


"Oh, forget it," said the farmer. "You can have the duck."

Arab food in a malay village

My first taste of an arabic dish was when I was a small boy. For breakfast one day, my mother cooked some mashed green-coloured beans with spices and toasted a few french loaf slices to go with it. The dish was eaten with an egg fried in ghee plus some roughly-chopped onions and green chillies as garnish.

At first try, the thing had a spicy-bitter taste that was hard to describe... but I loved it. Mom said that the dish is called `kacang pol'. Funny name, I thought... but later on in life I noted that there are variants to the name : pol, pool, ful and even phool. All these from translating the original arabic name of foul medames.

In my trip to Cairo in 2004, I had my first taste of authentic foul medames. The buffet breakfast spread at the hotel had two versions of the dish, Egyptian-style and Lebanese-style... of course I tried both. Slightly different tasting compared to mom's version but delicious all the same.

My exposure to middle-eastern cuisine further broadened during my short stint working in the United Arab Emirates. The tough pressure of work was somewhat compensated by food-tasting adventures. That was where I developed an affection for lamb mandey and lovely fresh salad dishes. Nowadays, whenever I hear of an Arabic restaurant opening up in KL, I would make an effort to try it out. To date, Saba Restaurant at Jelatek is still the best in my book.

Of late, Johor Bahru is seeing a few genuine Arabic restaurants opening for business... genuine in this sense, meaning with real Arab cooks. Not those run by locals who cook from recipes they learned when they were students in Egypt or Jordan or wherever. The latest one is called Wadi El-Arab Restaurant located right here in my district of Kg Melayu Majidee. It just opened a few weeks ago and I must say the owner is taking a huge gamble in opening a speciality restaurant out of the city centre.

It was our youngest son's 17th birthday on Friday and so I decided to have the celebration dinner at this new eating place. Wadi El-Arab is located just across the Medan Selera Kg Melayu (where you can get the best ABC in all of JB). The place used to be someone's house and was renovated into a restaurant. Decor-wise, there is nothing to shout about. The front part of the dining area is carpeted and has low tables for that sitting-on-the-floor experience. The inner dining area has simple round tables of the kopitiam type, not quite to my liking.

The menu choices is about average I guess, but sufficient enough for those not familiar with arabian food to try out some variety. They have bokhari rice, makloubeh, kofta, shawarma, shish tawok plus some salads and soups. Most importantly (to me, at least) they have mandey.

The birthday boy and his elder brother had grilled lamb kofta while the missus ordered the same but beef. These are spiced minced meat rolled onto metal skewers, grilled over charcoal fire, served with roasted eggplant and homous, and eaten with arab flat bread. I ordered what else but lamb mandey... at RM19.80 per plate, the most expensive rice dish on the main course menu. Wasn't the best that I had (which would still be at a restaurant somewhere in Muscat, Oman) but still on the okay side. The kofta dishes are the tasty ones. Overall not too bad... but they really need to pull in more crowd to make the long haul.

The cover menu card

Mandey lamb rice

Lamb kofta

And I honestly hope they do because it is now so easy for me to satisfy my craving for a mid-eastern dish with this place at my doorstep. I'm already thinking of the next dish to try.... perhaps their makloubeh, the upside-down rice and lamb/chicken combo.