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

Mongolian Tofu @ Ah Poh's Kitchen

Mongolians are never famous for their food. Being Nomads, they only ate what they found off the land and they are not farmers either. So when this dish came up, I had to figure it out if this was the genuine stuff. 

Ah Poh Kitchen in Johor Bahru isn't the easiest places to find but when I did, I was curious if this seemingly ordinary restaurant could offer anything better. Now for a moment imaging that you are having the rather famous Fried Yam Ring with vegetables, crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. Now imagine replacing the Yam ring with one that is made of smashed tofu with yam bits. That's what the Mongolian Tofu is all about. There are chicken bits, onions, slices of mushrooms with a sauce. 

The sauce is nothing extraordinary. I think it was a misfire on the chef's end. It is light, and lacks character. Since Tofu is bland, you will need a sauce that will personify its character, this obviously didn't. And what made it worst was that it was suppose to be a signature dish. 

Even after deep frying the Tofu, the dish still didn't cut it. But I must say this. It's healthy and well suited to older folks who do not want to taste anything too sweet or salty. 

I couldn't find a redeeming feature even though I wasn't turned off by the dish. It tasted ok, no ground shaking aftershocks. It was also reasonably priced, and eaten with rice, it could be a stomach filler. 

Mongolian Tofu @ Ah Poh's Kitchen

Spicy Tiger Prawns @ Solmar Macau

In its heyday, Solmar was a restaurant patronized only by aristocrats before opening up to the public. It was set up in the 1960s, a decade or so before the casino boom. The old Macau as we once knew it relied on fishing and firecrackers and this one dish fits that era very well. Literally translated from Portuguese, it means the Sun and the Sea (solmar).

Solmar's signature Spicy Prawns is one that harks back to a time when Prawns were aplenty. The price is not fixed, and at market prices, it can be expensive but it is well worth the eats.

Cooked in spices which taste very similar to that of the Malaysian "masak merah" sauce, it simply shines when eaten with rice. The sweetness of the prawns combined with the sauce is something you just have to reach out to in your lifetime. It is not Chinese in design or Portuguese in creation, the dish is simply Macanese with a hint of Straits malay cooking. Such creations is not uncommon even though the Portuguese chose to abandon South East Asia to the Dutch and English. There are pockets of cuisine from that part of the world which has made an indelible mark on the food culture there.

There are no other dishes in Macau that comes close to this. Many restaurants serve a version of this but somehow they all fall short of the ones served in Solmar—as if they actually have this closely guarded secret recipe.

The restaurant is simply old school, no fancy tables, just good eats. The waiters may even be a bit rude, and have been known to be "potato nazis" where you will be told strictly that you won't be getting an extra potato even after getting down on your knees to beg.

The decor is so old school, you could be forgiven that they forgot to upgrade the furniture after repainting the restaurant, but that is the quirky side of this place, you deal with it when you eat here and no apologies are given.

Spicy Prawns @ Solmar Restaurant