Jason’s Blog

10/02/2007, Saturday

Another bright sunny hot day. I woke up kinda late this morning since I had quite a late night. Yesterday was my Dad’s birthday, so we went to a newly opened steamboat restaurant in Prima Setapak along Jalan Genting Klang for dinner. They had four different soup bases to choose from: the usual Ajinomoto soup, Tom Yam, Herbal and Porridge. We decided to be a little adventurous and ordered Herbal and Porridge. From the photographs in the menu, the Porridge base appeared green but when the waitress poured it into our steamboat poat, it was actually yellow in colour!! Somwehow it reminded me of Rusky’s Baby Cereal that me and my Sis used to eat last time ^_^

We chose the Seafood Set and a side order of Nam Yee Chicken. While waiting for the goodies to cook, I scanned the area around us. There were only four tables that were occupied at that time; two tables outside were occupied by a family and a couple of lovebirds and the other table inside was taken up by an Indian lady with 2 sons. She was kinda blur and didn’t know what to do. Her soup almost overboiled and she didn’t know what ingredients to be put in to cook first. Once in a while, she would call for assistance to put the food into the soup. Either she was damn Lan Si or it was her first steamboat meal. There were a few fellas walking around giving orders to the waiter and waitresses there and they fall roughly within the same aged group. This restaurant must be operated on a joint venture basis and those fellas should be the co-managers

We were halfway eating when one of the restaurant’s co-manager came over to ask us for any suggestions and complaints. He said since they venture was only opened last week, they wanted to obtain as much feedback as possible from their customers to better improve their food and service. We complimented their Porridge soup base, which was delicious and mentioned that their Nam Yee Chicken was slightly on the salty side. It was just a casual comment, I mean restaurants sometimes tend to be a little generous with their salt during marination, so we didn’t think that it would mean much to him. But he was suddenly so apologetic and went into the kitchen. A while later, he came out with a large plate of watermelon to wash off "the salti-ness" on the house, and apologised again to us. We really didn’t expect him to give us this extra service and turned down his kind offer. However, he proceeded with inserting toothpicks onto the watermelons for us and laid it onto the table for us before apologising AGAIN. Well, it was a rather surprising and pleasant experience that he went all out to make our dining a special and memorable one. The entire meal was quite cheap, only 41 bucks. Best of all, to lure in more customers, they had a special introductory discount of 20% until the 15th of this month. All in all, yesterday’s dinner was fun and unforgetable!

Went home after that and watched American Idol 6 on 8TV. Mom had baked a large cake and bought a bottle of sparkling grape juice, so we toasted to Dad’s health. While I was watching American Idol (and later Rush Hour 2) with Dad, Mom was busy folding decorations made from the extra Angpows that we had kept. It is customary for us to fold mobiles such as birds, fish, lanterns or even firecrakers to be hung all over the house on the even of New Year; I so can’t wait. Now, all we need to do is to clean the house a little bit more and await my Sis’ return. ^_^