Piggin' Out: U Restaurant, Bangsar

Restaurant: U Restaurant
Address: 69-1, Jalan Bangkung, Bukit Bandaraya, Bangsar
Tel: 03 2093 1268
Opening times: 12-2.30pm and 6-11pm
Cuisine: Japanese
Other reviews: TheEdge article, Jules Eating Guide

Last weekend, Rommel and I visited our chiropractor after a 4-month disappearance (we've been busy and been procrastinating since our last appointment in August). She's moved to Jalan Bangkung from Jalan Telawi so that means new restaurants to check out!

Now, Jalan Bangkung isn't exactly a new place to me as my aunt and family have been living there for the past 15 years (maybe more?). I love the quiet and discreet surroundings of this part of Bangsar, it's full of memories since I spent most of my childhood weekends at my aunt's house.

We tried U Restaurant - a sister restaurant to Uzen in Concorde Hotel, KL.

Rommel had the sashimi set - RM35 for 8 pcs of sashimi, a bowl of rice, soup and chawan mushi. Portions here are pretty small and and really, it looked rather depressing. The butterfish tataki was overdone and tasted funny. The rest were just mediocre. A far cry from what we usually get at Uzen (it's on my dad's list of decent Japanese restaurants in KL).

I had the pomfret zosui - also RM35. Pricey but at least the pomfret was fresh. A clean, simple meal.

For dessert, we shared the banana fritters with ice cream. (RM12).

The bananas were deep fried in tempura batter. Didn't taste as good as your usual roadside pisang goreng but that's because the bananas were not ripe enough. Solved by dunking it in the ice cream.

Overall: Nothing special. And there was no one else in the restaurant that Saturday which is rather unsettling but then again, we got there at 2pm.

Will we go back? Probably not in the near future.

An afternoon with kitties and scones

Shen, as promised, here are the pictures of the kittens playing yesterday...





And of the scones I made for tea... (okay I cheated and it's from a premix but it tasted pretty good so I dont care). The clotted cream and lovely while the strawberry jam was irresistable.




Shen, I haven't taken pics of the bags I bought for you yet but willdo it soon. Hopefully before I leave for India.

Turning point in my life

In the past 3 days, I've gone through 3 major hurdles in my career:

1) I passed 1 part of my licensing exam. 1 more to go. It's a major event because I dont ever have to sit for it again.

2) I've finally initiated on my first stock and am on my way to becoming a full-fledged analyst.

3) I spoke on the morning meeting for the first time today.


Perhaps these do not seem significant to some since they've done it before or they do it all the time. But to me, it's the fact that theball's starting rolling. It's the start of more to come. That's what counts.

And now, back to the hard work bit of things...

Piggin' Out: La Lot, Pavilion

Restaurant: La Lot,
Address: Lot 6.36, Level 6, Pavilion KL
Tel: 03 2148 4231
Cuisine: Vietnamese
Other reviews: thestar article, andreacsp, epicuriousgirl, lifeofcontinues

Finally tried La Lot after months of saying, "We should try this place out." My dad is always game for Vietnamese food (unlike Thai food where we practically have to force him through the entrance of any Thai restaurant. He's just not a fan of Thai food outside of Thailand - that's another story altogether.)

The most interesting dish was the durian chicken wings. Looks like simple grilled wings but you get a faint hint of the durian smell when it's served. When you bite through it, again the durian taste is very subtle but surprisingly it tastes really good.


We also had the mixed platter appetisers. Deep fried prawn rolls, beef skewers and sorry I cant remember what else.

This is my favourite dish to order in Sao Nam - the grilled lemongrass chicken noodle salad. So naturally, I had to order to be able to compare that and the one here in La Lot.

I'll say that the vegetables were perhaps rather tired looking, unlike in Sao Nam where the veg are nice and crunchy. Taste-wise, I prefer the one in Sao Nam.

Shen ordered the beef stew with rice. The sauce was a bit too salty.

Fatteh ordered the ubiquitous pho bo (beef noodle soup). Pretty good stock and the quality of beef was not too bad too. Pretty much how we'd expect pho to be.

Overall, nothing really impressive. The only dish we'd really come back for is the durian chicken wings.

I have a sudden craving for good pho bo at Pho 2000 in Ho Chi Minh City. Sigh...

Piggin' Out: House of Sundanese Food, Suria KLCC

Restaurant: House of Sundanese Food
Address: 4.12, Level 4, Suria KLCC
Tel: 03 2166 2272
Website: *click here*
Other reviews: Tummy Thoughts

This is one of the few restaurants my mom and I like to dine in when we're in KLCC. It has been around for quite a number of years now and the food has consistently been good.

What we like here are:

Cumi-cumi Bakar - grilled squid that's marinated with a sweet dark sauce.

Ikan Nila Goreng - deep fried fish with chillies and onion in dark soy sauce. My mom's favourite dish, so crispy that I eat the bones too.

And we tried a new dish they recommended this time: Deep fried aubergines with eggs and ikan bilis. A surprising delight for us that it was really good but then I like aubergines, eggs and ikan bilis so in my books, you can't really go very wrong by combining them!

To fill up our meat requirement, we ordered the chicken rendang. This wasn't very good compared to the rest though. Nothing much to shout about.

All of this served with your choice of white rice or briyani rice or both.

Piggin' Out: Buddha Jump Over the Wall on NYE

Restaurant: Extra Supertanker

Location: Bukit Utama Golf Club (map included below)

For New Year's Eve, Pa wanted to treat us to something special so we headed to his new favourite restaurant - the recently opened Restoran Extra Supertanker 2 in Bukit Utama Golf Club. (sister restaurant to the outlet with the same name in Damansara Kim)

We had Buddha Jump Over the Wall - the proper kind with that's cooked in a huge pot and is served as 3 dishes - the sharksfin soup to start, a second soup with other goodies like fish maw and dried scallops, then the final dish of a whole abalone.

We also had king prawns, lightly grilled with a bit of sauce.

And my fav - chui pei taufu. Simple and delicious. Would prefer it with more dried shrimps on top though.

And the finale, fried rice for some carbs.

Piggin' In: Fish head curry at home

Okay maybe not quite home-cooked.

When my dad gets a good cut of fish from Uncle Loh of Kaleebso, he almost immediately starts making plans for a big fish meal - either bringing it to a restaurant for them to cook it for us or he attempts to do something with it at home. When eating at home, we've discovered a really easy but yummy way to cook fish head curry: we BUY the curry and its condiments then add in the fish before serving it for dinner.

This place in Puchong has pretty good fish head curry so my dad drops by after work to pick up the curry sauce, just in time for dinner.

If you can't see the details, here they are:
Name: Restoran Kari Kepala Ikan Tiga
Address: No. 19, Jln BPU 2, Bandar Puchong Utama, 47100 Puchong
Tel: 019-6477941 / 016-2882879

At home we get the fish ready by lightly frying it in some oil so that it doesn't break up when it's put into the curry. We had a nice cut of parrot fish today.

And here's our fish head curry, Chinese-style with tau pok, long beans, lady's fingers and cabbage.

To accompany the curry, we had salt-baked chicken and vegetarian noodles with lam yue sauce from Puchong Ocean Ship Restaurant.

That day, someone gave us a whole roasted duck as well so we had that too!

*yum*