Healthy longevity herbal steamboat food post
So sometime ago my mom takes me to this.... like.... herbal steamboat kind of place where make a business out of making food with lots of healthy longetivity-inducing chinese herbs..... it's like a sort of Brands Chicken Essence in restaurant form. Apparently these kinds of chinese herbs restaurants are somehow popping up, there's another one inside Aeon Bukit Tinggi shopping mall and one more opposite (outside) the mall. Well, the excuse of making food that was steeped in herbs means all these places charge an arm, a leg and then maybe a liver for really simple dishes (of course, the idea is that said arm, leg, liver and attached person will be really healthy from eating their food... XD ).
So everything in the restaurant is steeped from herbal stuff, even the Chinese tea -- we got a teapot full of inky black, herbally stuff. What I like is that I can actually taste some kind of root in the tea, which, being kind of the point of the place, I really like. Plus, I just like chinese herbs in general.
Apart from steamboat, there's a few side dishes that you can try as well, but it's just mom and me, so we only had steamboat without side dishes.
You get a choice of spicy or chicken soup bases as well, or you can pick a half-and-half pot. We went for the chicken soup base. Here's the empty soup before we chuck stuff in:
I like that it comes middlingly opaque with plant bits floating in it (again, because it's herbal.). It's only slightly watery at this point, with a strong taste of herbs/roots.
The steamboat ingredients are priced according to what plate/ingredient you order. You get the usual choice -- fish, meat, veggies, meatballs, nooodles, mushrooms, egg, and so on.
The most unusual ingredient has to be octopus sausage:
Yes, in real life, it is very dark charcoal grey, almost a dull black. It has a slight tendency to fall apart if you boil it too long, and tastes slightly sweet. The texture is a bit chewy (octopus) and soft (....whatever the black stuff is, it's the soft and sweet-ish part).
And these are just plain delicioius:
Pork, with a nice fat marble. Well, a little bit of fat is healthy, right? XD Just don't overcook it.
And here are scallops:
They shrank to half their size after cooking, so they were a little hard to find in a sea of junk herbal bits XD
Soup in full boil with straw mushrooms added:
The waittresses were really attentive, but one of them poked the soup of out my fuchow meatballs, spilling the soup inside, sheesh =_=
Summary
Location: Somewhere on Jalan Kasuarina 7, Bandar Botanik, 41200 Klang, Selangor, Malaysia
Halal? NO
Price range: RM172 for two people, and we aren't big eaters either ^^;
I want to eat: Pork, squid sausage, the meatball with fish eggs in it.
I don't want to eat: -
star rating: (Completely ignoring the price tag XD ) 1.8/3. It's actually pretty good and very very herbal, which I like. The price does make this more of a once-in-a-purple-moon kind of place though.