23 MARCH 2018, today is a meal with someone special, my sister in law(actually soon to be). Okay maybe not special to me but special to my little brother. It's actually the first time she joined us for dinner. The restaurant we had our dinner this time was picked by my mom. She was given a 20% discount as her birthday present from one of her traditional Chinese health food supplier. As we sat down I took a look at the menu, it was large and interesting. Lots of delicious looking hearty dishes. We had a great chat with my little brother girlfriend, but we cannot say the same for the food and you will know why shortly.
1) huai shang chicken bun
What's interesting of this dish to me is the bun. It has a double texture mouth feel, the bun itself is thin and crispy while the upper portion of it is topped with very fragrant sesame oil cookie. The filling itself is pretty good as it is, very moist but lack of lean meat, a lot of fat used.
2) bbq pork puff
The bbq pork is flavoured with Chinese 5 spice and wrap in puff pastry, pretty standard. Compared to others restaurant their bbq pork puff is average.
3) homemade charcoal bean curd
This black unusual charcoal bean curd may seem like it has a stronger flavour to its little brother the regular white bean curd, but don't get tricked by it. It literally have no difference! The bean curd has a satisfying smooth interior while in contrast having a good chewy fried exterior. It is accompanied by a stir fried soy seasoned minced meat mixture. Also just average in taste.
4) braised pork knuckles with black bean vinegar
A good braised pork knuckles should be fall of the bone tender, meaty savoury, moist, and it should be able to disintegrate in your mouth . However this dish only ticked 1 out of 4. Only element ticked is it is fall of the bone.the meat is way too overbraised, braising such cuts is essential but this is just way too over. The meat is so off balance, it's crasy sour till I think it became sweet( in a terrible way). Flavour is just odd! Being a knuckle freak, this is real disappointing.
5) braised chicken herbal with"yimucao" and ginger wine
Yimucao is a type of Chinese herb. strong ginger wine flavour found in the soup would taste great if we could drink more
( we were freaked out by the amount of oil floating on the broth). The chicken was so dry ,almost tasteless but tender.
6) lotus leaf rice
Glutinous rice is used in this dish, it gives a unique sticky mouthfeel. The rice is mixed with dried prawn, shiitake mushrooms, pork meat and seasoned with sauce sauce and oyster sauce. The mixture is then wrapped in lotus leaf and steamed. The rice was towards the mushier side. Taste wise , nothing to shout out about.
7) 6 flavour herbal chicken soup
It is supposed to help make the spleen and liver work better, very savoury, sweet herby taste. All I can say is , its either you love it or hate it.
8) ba zhen dark chicken soup
It's said to help increase stamina and blood circulation. My mom was kinda stopping me from drinking it, she said "its for women on period to consume it". But I guess it's just food so I just drink it. Like the soup before its savoury and sweet, either you love it or hate it. I sure my western friends have not seen this before, it is cooked using a black type of chicken.
Overall, good talk, bad food. It is said that their food is very nutritious , which maybe true. However that doesn't give the excuse to produce such low quality dishes. I have always ate healthy and nutritious food at home, thanks to my beloved mom. There is time the food she cooked is plain but never worst than the food we had for dinner today. Food was price too, it cost us 5 125myr ( 32usd), after using the voucher of 20% the final price was 100myr (26usd).
Official website
https://www.euyansang.com.my/en_MY/the-zun-kitchenette/eys-zun.html