The Malaysian Insider :: Food
The Malaysian Insider :: Food |
| Chef Choi: A Chinese New Year celebration Posted: 25 Jan 2013 06:03 PM PST  Trust the chef... just enough sauce to coat the yee sang and no more. Take the Yee Sang, the celebratory once-a-year dish that appears only during Chinese New Year (well, actually it begins several weeks before so you will likely have it more than once during this time of the year). The sauce for the Yee Sang here is so good you WILL want more. Dried longan water, mandarin peel and lime juice have been added to the original sauce recipe and what you get is a sublime, piquant sauce. Chef owner Chan Thye Seng serves the Yee Sang with just enough sauce to coat the melange of vegetables and slivers of ocean trout and no more. Think a perfectly tossed salad. But if your tongue still hankers for the sauce, ask for some cut fruit to eat with it. Later. There were, of course, other surprises on the menu that night. Who would have expected scrambled egg with truffle oil, deepfried barbecued pork bun and smoked salmon sushi to be on one platter, in the Special Three Combination? It was the lightest, creamiest scrambled egg I had ever eaten, with a fragrant lift from truffle oil. The deepfried char siu bun was not oily and provided a nice texture contrast to the eggs. I also liked how the smoked salmon sushi left a lingering smoky aftertaste. In a fine Chinese restaurant, double-boiled soups are always something to look forward to. We had the Shark Cartilage Soup with Bamboo Pith. Shark meat is eaten in some western countries, hence the availability of shark cartilage.  The salsa... refreshing and yummy, goes perfectly with the roast pig (left). Lap Mei Fan here is made with Basmati rice (right). Next up, was the suckling pig roasted on a spit served with a zucchini, bell pepper, cilantro and tomato salsa and tortilla chips. This kind of roasting leaves the skin extra crispy leaving the skin still succulent. We were wowed by the crackle, the spiced aromas and the juicy meat. Most of us had fallen on the salsa before the suckling pig was brought to the table; it was irresistible with the tortilla chips. The Pau Yue Yat Woh, or braised abalone with exotic seafood in claypot, was such a luxurious treat. Besides whole dried abalones, it had sea cucumber, dried oysters and plump dried scallops, goose webs, Chinese mushrooms, black moss and fish maw, all contributing to a smooth, silky dish. It was served surrounded with broccoli florets. The complex seafood flavours in the sauce were soaked up by the tender goose webs, fish maw and sea cucumber which had still a bite to it. It tasted wonderful. A claypot of these goodies costs RM108 per portion for each person, with a minimum of four persons. One taste and you will understand why.  The starter platter of scrambled eggs with truffle oil, fried char siu bun and smoked salmon sushi (left). Dessert of Cherries Jubilee was made table-side (right). We moved on to the highly-anticipated Lap Mei Farn. At Chef Choi, Basmati rice is used for this claypot rice flavoured with delicious drippings from aromatic waxed meats, local pork sausages, and goose liver sausages from the famed Yung Kee restaurant in Hong Kong. This time the excellent pork sausages overshadowed the goose liver ones. Dessert that night was Cherries Jubilee. Black cherries, chosen for their ability to soften quickly when stewed, were used, and we watched the cooking tableside. It began with the melting of butter and the caramelisation of sugar, with lemon zest, kirsch and Grand Marnier added, and the flambéing with cognac at the end. It was sublime, the soft cherries bursting in the mouth with heady juices, and cooled by the vanilla ice-cream served with it. The Ocean Trout Yee Sang is RM83 for a small portion and RM128 for a large. The suckling pig is RM330. The Chinese New New sets are priced at RM988, RM1388 and RM2688. Chef Choi is located at 159 Jalan Ampang, Kuala Lumpur, Tel: 03-2163 5866, website. |
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