Fried Pork Loin @ Kah Kah Loke Restaurant

Bitter, which sounds like please in German but let me tell you that bitter in Chinese and Indian cuisine is good for you.

This is probably the strongest contrast between western and eastern cooking and how I feel that Asian cuisine will always be more exotic than the vanilla styled, diary and herb style ingredients found in continental and American cooking. 

How else can you explain the fascination with Asian flavors. Fortunately, there are cuisines that are still palatable to Westerners who might cringe at the thought of eating bitter gourd. 

At Restaurant Kah Kah Loke, you can heartily dig into a bowl of bitter gourd soup, infused with porky flavors and less than bitter gourd slices. The Chinese believe that eating bitter gourd is a good way to cool the body and for the Indians, it is a cure for diabetes. You can even get the Kavela pills that are made with bitter gourd to treat diabetes so what's not to like about bitter gourd?

The bitter gourd soup at Kah Kah Loke is the most fascinating piece of bitter cuisine, and you get to choose your ingredients. The waiter at hand will ask you if you'd like to have pig offal, such as liver and bits of intestines or just plain pork. Or for that matter everything of the above. The best part of this experience is the bitter gourd soup is actually palatable to Westerners. The bitter gourd itself has been prepared in such a way that the bitterness has been eliminated. The soup self is plesantly porky, and if you like the taste of pork, this is one soup you will be coming back for more. 

The soup dish is eaten with rice of course, and you can call the highly recommended mabo tofu, which is soft bean curd with mince pork or a side of pig offal stir fried with ginger and soy sauce. I have no idea why Westerners seem to dislike offal. Anthony Bourdain regularly woofs it down an calls it soul food.

Even in the past, none of a slaughtered animal was wasted and people too poor to afford the best cuts of meats from the butcher had to settle for offal. Apparently the sophisticated palate is just not in the West. In Asia, the well heeled young will refuse to indulge in anything except prime cuts. Hopefully these highly tasty discarded meat will end up with pets as it would be a complete waste to throw them away.

As much as I like the soup and sides, the killer dish has to be the fried pork loin. Each tasty morsel is coated and deep fried giving it a crisp outside while being moist and soft on the inside. The pork loin is flavored just right, and should it be fed to westerners, they won't be able to stop eating it. I say enough about this dish except to rate it for what it is worth. You can't go wrong with this dish. 

Restaurant Kah Kah Loke has five outlets, two of which are in Johor. The bitter gourd soup unfortunately is not very consistent from branch to branch. The outlet at Taman Sutera, serves up better bitter gourd soup than the original Johor Jaya branch. 

However, the fried pork loin taste superb at both these places so for that alone, I highly recommend it. 

Hakka Fried Pork Loin @ Kah Kah Loke Restaurant, Taman Sutera