South Sea Seafood

South Sea Seafood Restaurant
229 Jalan Dua A Kg Baru Subang
Tel: 03-7846-5813/1401

I'm sure many of you have passed by this place. It's just after Terminal 3 of the old Subang Airport - you can't miss it. It's been around for quite some time.

As you walk up the wooden steps into the restaurant, you'll be struck by the tanks and tanks of live seafood all lined up on one side...

Look at those triangles of dried sharksfin all hung up high on the wall! These are expensive stuff (that's why they are hung up HIGH!)

Let's take a closer look at those tanks... Sea Garoupa - those spotted/banded mean-looking fish...
Mantis Prawns - LL's favourite! They looked kinda weird and "geli" swimming around the tank, with their fat little legs paddling...

And these are the grossest-looking things around - Geoduck! They're supposed to be delicious though...

The elegant-looking pristine Snow Crabs - too big for my taste (and expensive!)...

These are more to my taste (and budget) ... the local crabs...


Lobsters, anyone??
Fresh abalones sharing a tank with the snow crab...
And these are the lala's, clams, cockles... all fresh and alive...

On the weeknight that we went for dinner, the place was pretty crowded...

The "4 Heavenly Kings" (ladies' fingers, petai, four angled beans & longbeans) we ordered was decent (although I dunno why they call these simple beans "kings"??). The beans were crunchy and lightly saute'ed in sambal...

The Crispy Sotong fried in batter was well-presented. Taste-wise, the squids were fresh and succulent and the batter light & crunchy - a good appetizer, I would say.

LL's favourite - Mantis Prawns, done in their signature style: deep-fried and tossed with bits of garlic, chilli padi and spring onions. These babies cost RM12 each - certainly not cheap, considering the meagre amount of succulent flesh hidden under the carapace. Oh yess! They were utterly delicious and 1 piece is certainly not enough but when you think of paying RM12 for that mouthful of sweet shrimpy flesh...well.... you think again!

We had their Tilapia - steamed Assam-style and this was a great hit! There were tomatoes, brinjals, ladies' fingers sharing the plate and the piquant sourish assam gravy made the boys asked for 2nd helpings of rice. Needless to say, the fish was super-fresh (as it was swimming in a tank prior to becoming our dinner).
Ahh... I had to have their XL-sized fresh cockles. They served this lightly cooked on a hotplate and then you eat them with their sambal dips... oohhh - absolute cholesterol-laden heaven!

Another one of LL's favourites - Japanese Escargots - baked with cheese. Not my favourite - ("just as well", so said LL!).

Their portion of Fried Rice was very generous - we had to tapau half of it back! Taste-wise, just like most fried rice you find in chinese restaurants lah - nothing out of the ordinary.

The service level of this place is superb. Staffed mainly with foreign workers, they were attentive without being intrusive. They were amazingly efficient in changing your plates and replenishing your chinese tea. But what impressed me was... one of them must have overheard me lamenting that I was too lazy to walk to the washroom to clean and my hands ... because in the next instant, this appeared on the table in front of me!

And then when you have paid your bill, they bring this to your table... to remind you...

We soooo liked this place that we went back there for lunch on another day. Besides ordering the must-have Mantis Prawns and Japanese Escargots (guess on whose insistence lahh!!)... we ordered the Tilapia again but this time cooked in Green Curry...

I was a bit disappointed as there was no brinjals (or any other veg, besides the bunch of decorative spring onions) accompanying the fish. The curry was a bit bland too. LL remarked we should just have stuck to the assam-style!

The Sweet Potato Leaves saute'ed with dried prawns were refreshing.

Ahh... this time we had their crabs - the local ones. Costing Rm36 per crab (not cheap!!), we had 2 of them cooked in the now-popular-everywhere Salted Egg Yolks style. A double whammie for cholesterol certainly... the crabs came thickly coated with the killer salted egg yolks. I assure you every piece of shell was wiped clean when we were done with this!

Ehh... don't play play - they have a popular HK actress as their Ambassador, you know! You can see lots of media write-ups pinned on their walls. If you can't make out who the ambassador is, maybe this pic will help...

Yeah, it's Michelle Mei Suet...

Oh... another thing... if you park at their carpark across the road , it's almost impossible to cross the road to the restaurant because the traffic there is really unbelievably BUSY. But they have their own "traffic attendant" who will stop the traffic for their customers to cross the road or drive out from the carpark - yess, that's excellent service for you!

Despite their rather steep prices, I would go back again for the fresh seafood and excellent service.

My rating: 8/10

Best Food Junction featured my blog post!

Hey Folks!
Have you seen this magazine in the news-stand lately? :-))

They featured a review I wrote on "Dave's Pizza" - this was posted in my blog here sometime in mid-January. They did write to me asking for permission prior to publishing it.
It's a pretty cool mag - featuring food reviews by bloggers (eg Foodilicious, KampungboyCitygal, Tham Jiak, Ling's Passion etc), restaurants and travel talk and other special features.


Price: RM2.99 only!

Pumpkin Seeds

Currently I am addicted to these pumpkin seeds. These are the "green tea" flavoured ones. They have other flavours too, like rose, jasmine or just plain ones.

They are not cheap either. A 300g tub of these seeds cost RM15.
The seeds are bigger, sweeter and crunchier than the usual other types of seeds and that's why I am so addicted, hehe! Snacking on seeds is healthier, right?!

Day Trip to Tanjung Sepat

What do you do on a long weekend?
Take a road trip! And all the much better if that trip includes food!

Yeahhh! So that's how we decided to take a drive to Tg Sepat last weekend. In fact, my friend Z and I had wanted to go the weekend before but I managed to catch a bad cold that Saturday, so we decided to postpone the trip.
After reading about Ciki's post on her trip there and with Z's strong recommendation, Tg Sepat became a "must-go" place! And since my other good friend, X was also back in town, it was a perfect time to go for this mini adventure!

It was a cloudy morning when we set out after breakfast ... downcast skies and all... but nevertheless the drive to Tg Sepat was pleasant. It took about an hour from Shah Alam and traffic was great. We reached the little town at almost noon time and the first place we went to was the wet market. We were hoping to buy some fresh fish - we brought along our cooler bags too. However, we were disappointed as there was hardly any fish left at the stalls. The fishmongers told us to return in an hour or so when the next batch of fresh catch would arrive.
It was already starting to drizzle when we reached the market.

We saw some of these cute triangular spotted fish at one of the stalls. Not sure what they are called and certainly I have never seen them in our markets here. The fish-seller said they taste very good when fried. I didn't buy any because I thought we'd be coming back later when the next batch of fresh fish came in. We never did go back because by that time it was pouring and we headed straight home.
We asked the fish-seller where we could get some fishballs and he pointed us to a shop just behind the market.
Talk about "fresh"... well, these workers were actually making the fishballs by hand when we were there. There were quite a variety of fishballs... different shapes and sizes...

I ended up buying this lot of fishball stuff... good for steamboat, eh?
Next, we headed for the famous Tg Sepat Pau. It's located at Lorong 4, next to this Medan Penjaja...

This is the original shop - Hai Yew Heng...

They have just added on this "manufacturing facility" right across the original shop. This is where the paus are made and sold...
Modern machinery to help churn out the pau dough... but the pau are still wrapped manually...

Some of the paus, freshly steamed...
This is the menu of the variety of paus available. For those who don't read Chinese, they have paus with these fillings: pork ("sang yoke"), kaya, redbean paste, pickled veg + pork (mui choy + pork), vegetables and peanuts. The prices are pretty steep, for a small town like Tg Sepat... but the clientele is non-Tg Sepat, I would say. We saw busloads of tourists swarming and buying LOTS of the paus!

Well, we didn't do too badly either - we bought almost 100 paus among ourselves, haha!

They also have this special Yam Fritters being fried on-the-spot at the old pau shop...
They were really quite delicious... strips of yam with onions, shrimps, fried in batter...
Next we headed to the mushroom farm... the Ganofarm Factory...

If you think mushroom only comes in white and grey, then you're wrong! They come in all sorts of colours... pink, yellow, brick red, orange... all so pretty!

Don't you think these Yellow Oyster Mushrooms look kinda like corals?
And these are the Pink Oyster Mushrooms...
And of course, these are the regular grey ones...
They have a shop there which sells their packaged products... these are the yellow mushrooms...
And these are the other products... coffee...
... shampoo...
... and I bought this bottle of Lingzhi powder... seems it's some miracle healer... can heal all sorts of skin rashes, bites, burns, wounds etc!
From the Ganofarm, we headed towards the seafood restaurants as we were hungry by this time. We passed by this picturesque little scene on the way...
There's a row of seafood restaurants facing the sea but this one seemed to be the most popular one... Ocen Seafood Restaurant...

Lot 109 Jalan Laut
42800 Tg Sepat
Tel: 03-31974443

Can you see why? It was packed!
However, our food came pretty fast. The Fried Rice was pretty good - very flavourful. The portion we had was enough for all 5 of us and it cost only RM5.50.
The Hokkien Meehoon wasn't as good but again, at RM5.50, it was a huge plate! We couldn't even finish this - we had to tapau it back!
This plate of Sweet Potatoe Leaves (RM5) was fresh, sweet and crunchy and the portion was more than generous.
We thoroughly enjoyed the fresh Clams in Chinese Wine (RM16) - almost slurped all the soup!
Their Fried Crispy Sotong (RM10) was another crowd pleaser. The crispy pieces of fresh succulent squids disappeared in record time.
Now this here is their popular Fried Mini Fish (RM9) - I don't know what fish it is but these tender smooth morsels of fish fillet had very fine, hair-like bones which you can just swallow. Very unusual but very tasty!
We also ordered this Steamed Golden/Silver Pomfret (RM30) - extremely fresh and tasty.


The Mantis Shrimp (RM9) was disappointing. I couldn't really taste the shrimps as it was too overwhelmed in flour batter and buried underneath a mountain of bombay onions. You can skip this dish.The total bill for 5 of us was RM108 inclusive of drinks - we had several fresh Thai coconuts too! Very reasonable, good value and tasty lunch.

You should try visiting their toilets too... your end-products go straight down into a "collecting pond" right underneath...

See that pond there under the stilted toilet? I guess at high tide, the sea rushes in and "cleanse" the pond... so, errr... no swimming here please!

By lunch time, the sky was totally downcast and it started to rain... these scenes looked like some horror movie background, like something out of a Stephen King movie ... *imagine eerie soulful music too*

Oh, on the way back, driving past Morib, be careful of cows... they're everywhere and they think they're kings of the road!