Dinner @ Jimmy Leung's Kitchen, January 2010

This is Dad, and Mum - Dad with a rare smile in a photo!  You can see the backlit picture of a waterfall (it's a picture overlaid on top of an opaque plastic with a lightbox behind it or something).

This is my brother Stirfry Ninja looking reasonably bemused that I pointed the camera in his direction.  You can see the bowls lined up in front of him, awaiting the arrival of some soupy goodness, as well as the ever-present pot of Chinese tea.  Behind is the frosted glass window dividing the dining area from the kitchen - it's a one chef place, I'd be surprised if it seated much more than 30 at a time.  When we were there, there was a larger table of 9 or 10 up the front, a couple of tables with 2-4 people, and our table of 5 plus X.

This would be Decay looking a bit resigned that the camera was pointed his way.  And yeah, the camera got him with his eyes closed, oops (:

 


X got stuck into some prawn crackers once we were all seated - lately, he's not been too happy with sitting at the table if the wait for food gets a bit long.  I can see his point - why would you want to be sitting down when there's cars and trucks and vans and stuff outside to point and look at ?



We got a special soup - normally, a soup comes as part of a set menu, and it happens to be the house soup of the day.  Tasty, but nothing remarkable.  Mum decided to order one of the different soups they had - this one had young coconut meat, and Goji/Wolf berries , dried dates, and lots of tender and still tasty chicken pieces.  It was very savoury, and I know it looks 'thin', but it was actually a big hit of rich, but still clean in mouthfeel.  X really enjoyed the chicken pieces, but didn't want to try the soup.  I reckon he would've really liked the soup, but there's no point in forcing him into anything - it's not worth the angst it causes!



Here's a pic of the soup, close-up.  You can see that the broth isn't cloudy - it's dark in colour, but you can still see the stuff that's in the bowl.  Normally when you get the meat from a chicken-based soup, it's been boiled to death and is all stringy and doesn't have flavour anymore.  Here, I think they would've added more chicken pieces to cook through after the soup was made with some chicken that was strained out of the presentation bowl.  That, or the cooking was so gentle that the chicken never got to the stringy stage. 



The szechuan pepper sizzling crab is one of the specialties of this place - the crab gets the sizzling plate treatment with szechuan pepper and spring onion and ginger.  It was delicious - X had a fair amount of the crab meat that we picked out for him, asking for more! from all of us!



The crab came with some noodles with a crab-based broth.   These noodles were bouncy and gently infused with the savoury-sweet crab broth.




X had noodles, long and short, and he drank the crab broth and asked for more!

Next up were the main course dishes:



Steamed chicken with lup cheong, spring onion, mushrooms (reconstituted dried shiitake, I think), and soy sauce - the leafy thing is a lotus leaf, I think?  This chicken was also tender and full of flavour.



Spicy beef over egg custard.  Mum and Dad chose this because it was something they hadn't heard of being put together.  The custard was all egg white and possibly some chicken stock, quite (I want to say bland, but that's not quite the right word) in contrast to the peppery sauce that the pieces of beef were draped in.  The beef chunks were tender, but still needed some teeth work that X was sometimes unwilling to deal with - there were a few mini chunks just chewed out of all their flavour (:



Fried then braised fish with bitter melon, black bean, and fried beancurd.  Bitter melon is kind of an acquired taste.  It seems to get cooked with stuff a lot because it adds a mellowness and depth to the flavour of a dish.  Cooked right, the melon won't rip your mouth lining out from the bitterness, but make the flavours fill out your mouth.  Even if you don't eat the melon itself, it kind of imparts this flavour rounding on the rest of the elements in the dish.  I have no idea what this fish was, but it was meaty and textured enough to stand up to the strong flavours.  I don't think X tried any of this, but the rest of us enjoyed the fish.

 
Snowpea shoots with mushrooms.  The mushrooms were the usual reconstituted dried mushrooms that have appeared in a lot of dishes I've had.  I don't remember actually getting any of the snowpea shoots - I was pretty full from everything else!  We did have an interloper in a patch of the snowpea shoots in the way of extra protein from a caterpillar in the wrong place at the wrong time, but that probably didn't affect how much of this dish was eaten - it came quite late in our procession of main course dishes, so we were all nearing our limits by the time it was on the table.

For dessert, we had orange slices ....

slices of watermelon ...



... and a cold dessert soup with sago, coconut, and taro. Kind of hard to take a picture of a white bowl, with white soup, and clear bubbley bits, and chunks of purpley-white taro ... It was cool and kind of refreshing.  I think they made this in anticipation of warmer weather expected for the weekend that we went, but it wasn't as warm on Sunday when we went as it was the day before. 

We all really enjoyed this dinner - you wouldn't know from seeing this place from the side of the road that this wasn't really an ordinary suburban Chinese restaurant.  Then again I think both Decay and I are a wee bit picky when it comes to trying out Chinese restaurants because neither of us want to have anything to do with the Aussie-fied 'Chinese' food that's out there. We've had the real deal, so that's what we go looking for!