The menu at Lulu's Char Koay Teow is limited to a few dishes, but I don't hold that against them. I think that restaurants that only offer their specialty dishes are those that should do them very well and so will not disappoint. The specialty dishes here are the char koay teow and char mee and they did not disappoint. Even though the name of the restaurant is char koay teow, I actually like the char mee (quite simply Fried Noodles) better.
We ordered the Duck Egg Char Koay Teow $15.90 and Char Mee $14.90. The Penang CKT was smoky and fragrant. There were one or two small slices of lap cheong (chinese sausage), bean sprouts, chives, duck egg, definitely no fish cakes (this is one of the marks of an authentic CKT!) and two BIG prawns. The prawns were bigger than the ones you will find in other restaurants. They were juicy and fresh, so yum! Besides the original CKT, there are other CKT with special ingredients for different prices for e.g. blood cockles, razor clams, squid and jumbo prawns. If the normal prawns Lulu's use are already so large, I wonder what the jumbo prawns look like!!
This is the original Char Mee I enjoyed ($14.90), full of breath of the wok, the slightly alkalinic taste of the noodles and char from the wok makes it very enjoyable. As with the CKT, this also has pieces of crispy rendered lard which taste so good but oh so bad for health! Ah well... the diet starts tomorrow!
This place is really busy and you will find that there is a queue no matter the hour of the day. Luckily the mainly Asian clientele 'knows what to do' by keeping the chit chatting to a minimum, eating very quickly and moving on quickly after their meal so that the others waiting in the cold or heat outside can have their fix of CKT too.
Decor wise, there is a shelf of antique items in the shop that brought back some memories of Malaysia for me. There is a display of old style biscuit tins with the transparent plastic front that shows off what type of biscuits are in the tin like the ones in the pasar malam (night market) and old grocery stores. I remember those grocery stores with fondness, full of sacks of dried seafood, no name biscuits from big tins sold by weight, freshly grated coconut, gas canisters and off the shelf traditional medicinal oils. It is also the place where one trades information of which neighbour bought what item for what purpose and general gossip. These neighbourhood shops and hair salons are better information portals than the Internet, I tell you.
The price is higher than usual, but I think the two big prawns and the chef's skill is makes up for it.
No comments:
Post a Comment