Kowloon (Review)

Last night we checked out the new Cantonese-style seafood restaurant Kowloon (Jl. Raya Puputan Renon, Duta Wijaya No. 15-19 in Denpasar) which is partially owned by the cook who formerly worked at Bandar Seafood. Our friend Lexo is a friend of the cook Mr. Yip so we received a special invite for food tasting. I do not know if the menu we had was a special menu or the dishes are part of the normal menu, but it was fantastic. The starter was seafood and tofu soup and while I'm not a fan of squids and similar seafood, the soup was great. It was light yet full of flavors and the seafood and the tofu were perfectly cooked. The seafood remained tender while the tofu kept its form. Wid said that you're not a Hong Kong chef if you can't cook tofu. Hehe.

I also liked the addition of nori seaweed which gave the soup an extra flavor dimension. First surprise of the night was green bean. It wasn't any ordinary green bean. It was coated with deep-fried, spiced flour coating and mixed with cabbage and other things. It was spicy but not hot. The black pepper beef was good but not spectacular like the rest of the menu. Fish in a sweet and sour sauce was nice. The fish was tender and juicy. The stuffed chicken (with mushroom, carrots, etc.)with steamed broccoli was excellent. The crayfish deep-fried had a good flavor but the cray fish was tiny so it was hard to pick out all the meats. A turtle dish was also on the menu, but I didn't have any of it since I feel bad for the turtle.

The bit surprise of the night for me (and probably no one else) was the last vegetable dish. When it first came out, I thought it looked very familiar and I had a feeling that it was my favorite vegetable in the whole wide world. I have given up looking for it here. When I tasted the dish, I immediately knew I was right--it was 絲瓜 (loofah). Honey said that she's found the gourd in the local supermarket Tiara so now I'll be hunting this vegetable down. Now I just need to find its Indonesian name. The 絲瓜 was stir-fried with soy sauce and garlic, and it just tasted heavenly.

The service was quite good, and the food came out surprisingly fast. I think we spent more time waiting for our friends to show up than eating. I was surprised that the food didn't taste anything like the menu at Bandar Seafood, but it really shows Mr. Yip's versatility. This is definitely the best Cantonese food in Bali, and I have a feeling we'll be frequenting this place very regularly.

Not more fires!

We have guests visiting us right now and we wanted to take them to Mafongsun aka Honey's, which is our favorite Indonesian-Chinese food place. This place was more like a large food stall rather than a real restaurant. The formerly green colored walls were covered with soot and grease. The place looked like a dive but the food was great and no one we've known ever gotten sick from the food here. Our friend from Hong Kong who is quite picky when it comes to Chinese food highly approved of this place when we took him and his wife to the place. We decided to take our friends are Cantonese to this place. Unfortunately, that morning of our planned trip, the market which housed this restaurant burned down. Just our luck! It took about twelve hours for the firemen to put out the fire. I wonder what's going to happen to the people who ran the restaurant as well as all the occupants of the market. This market was huge and I feel sorry for all the people who had their shops there.

I don't think the authority knows the cause of the fire. Maybe it's an accident or maybe it's arson. Wid said that there were disputes about the land which the market was located. Something about wanting to turn the place into the parking lot. I guess we'll know when people decide what to do with the land.

It's really ironic considering the last time we planned to take some people to a new place, the exact same thing happened. I hope we're not cursed or anything.