December 04, 2009

Teo Chew Food @ Chao Yen, 1Utama

My laptop still has some life left and so, I'm taking the opportunity to blog about something before I embark on my minor upgrade exercise.

It won't be much, I'll most likely just upgrade my RAM from 1GB to 2GB and the HDD from 100GB to 160GB. My old laptop takes only IDE and so, I can't take advantage of the lovely SATA drives... Besides that, I can't seem to find those 320GB or 500GB IDE drives in the market anymore. :(

Oh well....

Anyway, it has been over a month since I had my little life-changing event... One of the first places I went to eat with EV was to a little restaurant in 1Utama. It was the Teo Chew restaurant called Chao Yen.

We've been curious about this place ever since the banner went up some months back before it opened. Both of us wanted to indulge in our Teo Chew heritage food and gave the place a try.

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EV and I love vegetables. In fact, I have to thank her for "teaching" me how to appreciate vegetables. We used to cook a lot back in our university days in Australia and so, she, being a "cow" would love to cook vegetables while I, being a "lion" loved my meat. I requested for little oil and low salt which was just nice.

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This brings me to the only meat dish we had. We ordered a set (which included a bowl of rice) of the braised Teo Chew styled chicken. The skin was a bit salty but the meat was just sweet. I do not recall my grandmother making this and EV's mom only makes the duck version for Chinese New Year only.

Chao Yen also serves other Teo Chew dishes such as the Teo Chew style Bak Kut Teh, i.e. pork ribs/meat in a tea-like broth and also "Or ni" which is the yam dish.

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Due to health reasons, I'm "forced" to take brown rice and was glad that this restaurant had an alternative option to white rice. It tasted yummy and chewy.

Anyway, these days, my rice intake has dropped significantly as I'm taking more vegetables in proportion to rice and meat. A higher fibre diet is what the doctor ordered and if I do take rice at home, it has to be brown rice and the most I can take is probably 2-3 tablespoons worth.

Chao Yen is pretty pricey. Our meal for 2 persons came to a total of RM 54++, which included a pot of fantastic Pu Er tea. The taste though is quite mild as there are not much spices or sauces to overpower the ingredients. Anyway, Teo Chew food tends to be quite "pure" and simple.

Not sure if I would recommend folks to try this place due to the price but Chao Yen offers a variety of Teo Chew cuisine which is not very Malaysianized and so, can be said that the food is more of China Teo Chew style...

3 comments:

  1. War...the vegetables are arranged so neatly huh. But later it will get in our stomach too. So no point. :p

    Didn't know that brown rice is this BROWN! :P

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  2. Yeah this brown rice from Chao Yen is very BROWN!

    You only take 2-3 tablespoons of brown rice? I'm not sure I can handle that. :P

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  3. Hi Tekkaus, Che-Cheh,

    Tekkaus - No joke.. They really took their time on presenting the vegetables in that manner. Haha!! The brown rice is unpolished brown rice.

    Che-Cheh - Yeah-lo but it taste just the same. :P I'm used to eating less rice at night now as I eat more greens, i.e. fibre which is quite filling.

    ReplyDelete

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