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Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Taiwanese Cuisine @ New Formosa Restaurant, SS2, Petaling Jaya

Prawns so good, we even ate the shells!

Are you counting down the days to Chinese New Year? Only 6 more days to go! Recently, we were invited by Mrs Jeanie Lee of New Formosa Restaurant in PJ to sample their Chinese New Year menu. New Formosa serves authentic Taiwanese cuisine ( Jeanie is Taiwanese and her husband-chef trained in Taiwan). I have only eaten the occasional Taiwanese meal in Fong Lye / Din Tai Fung, so my knowledge on Taiwanese cuisine is pretty limited BUT I do know when the food tastes good (regardless of the type of cuisine)! The food here was prepared in a simple manner, but was very good. 

Plus if you take into consideration the price, I would say a CNY meal here is good value for money. There are various menus to choose from, and within each set you also get options of dishes (don't think many places offer that) -- prices range from RM338 to RM498 nett for 10 persons. We had the opportunity to sample the RM498 nett set.

Formosan jelly fish yee sang


New menu with photos of food!
  
Pickled vegetable to whet the appetite


 We started with the obligatory CNY yee sang -- the version here contains both jellyfish and salmon. We tossed to even more wealth and better health.


God of Wealth, are you watching?


Colorful


Tossing and eating is the best part!


The RM498 nett menu consists of 8-courses plus 2 desserts. We started with the pineapple spare ribs and butter eel. OMG I love the eel.. the texture was so buttery with a crisp exterior, I certainly had my fair share of this. The sauce for the ribs was nice but the meat was a bit hard to get off the bones (I need to use my hands next time!).



Delicious, buttery eel

 For this menu, shark's fin soup with crab meat and bamboo pith will be served, however we changed ours to the fish skin with shredded vegetables and lean meat broth. The fish skin was hand carried back from Taiwan. Thick and smooth, it shows we don't need shark's fin to make a soup taste good.

Wholesome soup

Next up, is the steamed village chicken with yam and vegetable. Other options include braised pig's trotters in black pepper sauce or simmered herbal chicken with chestnuts. Steamed just right, the chicken is served with a ginger sauce and the chicken meat was juicy. The yam also had a nice bite to it, not too mushy or soft.


 This has to be my favorite of the evening, the grilled garlic prawns. So simple but perfectly executed -- I even ate the shells as the flavours are all in there!


Fish, a must-have during Chinese New Year dinners as they signify abundance. The silver pomfret can either be deep fried (Taiwanese home style cooking) or steamed (HK/Teochew style). We were served the deep fried version, then a savoury sauce made from Taiwanese soy sauce is poured over the fish. The skin was very crisp, while retaining the moist flesh.



The roasted pork with two kinds vegetable was next on the list. The brocolli was still crunchy and I enjoyed the oyster mushrooms which was cooked with the siew yoke. Didn't eat much of the siew yoke since I was pretty full by now. For a vegetarian option, you can go for the fried lotus root, green peas, gingko nuts and pumpkin.

The Taiwan Hakka bamboo rice was fragrant and full of ingredients such as yam. If you prefer noodles, you can order the Fried Noodles Taiwanese style which comes with pork, pig's tripe and shrimps!

Although we were already stuffed, Jeanie also ordered one of their signature dishes for us (not included in the CNY menu) -- the Famous Hunan Ham in Honey Sauce (RM42 for medium). I would liken the taste and texture to that of bak kwa, sweet and savoury at the same time and was perfect eaten with the deep fried Chinese silver bread. We were told that this dish takes approximately 3 hours to prepare!


For dessert, we had Taiwanese muachi (coated with peanuts), Taiwan traditional Aiyu jelly with black pearls and sweet yam in honey sauce Taiwanese style. The Aiyu jelly was lovely after a heavy meal, since it was very refreshing owing to the fresh lemon used in the drink. The sweet yam's preparation process was pretty cool to watch -- yam pieces are coated with honey and sesame seeds and then plunge into ice water and the caramel hardens into a delightful candy coating.

Taiwanese muachi (RM4)


Aiyu jelly (RM3.50)


Sweet yam (RM7 for small)


Thanks to Mrs Jeanie Lee for the kind invite, we certainly enjoyed our meal here. If only the roads to PJ was not so congested all the time!

The CNY menu is available until 6 February 2012. For more info, visit their website.

Full set of photos available to view here. 

Location: New Formosa Restaurant, 46 Jalan SS2/24, 47300 Petaling Jaya, Selangor.

Tel: 03-7875 1894

GPS Coordinates: 3.114216, 101.621078

*This is an invited review, i.e. complimentary.

19 comments:

  1. the chicken is presented as it traditionally should be done. the older generation will appreciate it.

    fish skin soup looks delightful. a good idea instead of the same old sharks fin (plus i don't take sharks fin)

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    Replies
    1. The fish skin soup was good, very thick and flavoursome.

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  2. I like the look of all of those fresh veges surrounding many of the dishes.

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    Replies
    1. It does add colour to the dish. We didn't touch most of it though since we were stuffed.

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  3. Went there for our CNY gathering last year.. agree that it's one of the more affordable menus around!

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    1. There's a photo of you in a cheongsam in their newly printed menu!

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  4. Replies
    1. It's really refreshing -- perfect after a heavy meal!

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  5. yummy....i think i know the place. Love the look of the bamboo rice. Any idea how much was the bamboo rice?

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    Replies
    1. Sorry dear, am not sure. I didn't take photo of the whole menu. And the menu on their website doesn't have prices. But I think it's quite reasonably priced since most of the items I looked at on their menu were.

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  6. Dear Babysumo

    Looks like a very elaborate and delicious meal! Been getting lots of invites lately too I see :)

    I know some of my Aussie friends will have a tough time eating the chicken with its head presented on the plate LOL.

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    Replies
    1. Lol. Must be all the yee sang I've been tossing, instead of the abundance of wealth coming in, been getting lots of food invites :P

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  7. ooo, i actually did have a chinese new year dinner here once, and the place was packed! i can't recall which day of chinese new year it was, but we ended up kinda cramped on a tiny table. the food was very good though, and it was well worth the price. just that the dinner conditions overall weren't too satisfactory, since it was just too crowded and the dishes took a long time to arrive. but i guess that's the danger of eating at a popular PJ place at this time of the year :D

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    1. Yeah, the restaurant is not big so I can imagine how busy it can get during CNY. When we were there, it was pretty quiet -- was nice like that! But I did enjoy the food very much, just traffic towards the restaurant is crazy mad!

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  8. Wow, it's like CNY-cuisine-marathon for you!! The bamboo rice looks good but i'm sure at that moment you were filled to the brim! And the sweet yam looks yum!

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    Replies
    1. Lol, only 1 more CNY review from me and I'm done.

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  9. Just done our lunch at this restaurant with coupon bought at Jackcow (http://www.jackcow.com/deals/new_formosa_taiwanese_restaurant_6_courses_4-6_pax). The coupon price is RM66.90 and worth for RM132. but we all don't feel the meal worth in that value. Just feel it just equal to the price we paid. Rice is not included in the coupon price also. We need to pay extra for that. A bit unacceptable. The food there taste ok...feel very localise... Not really got Taiwan taste.

    As we are not stay or go to the area. So I dont think we will go back to the restaurant again.

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  10. I also bought the coupon at Hulala. Also felt unpleasant experience. It the coupon mentioned free RM 10 voucher and didn't mentioned any condition to redeem it. But the staff said cannot and must purchase dishes more than RM 50 to redeem. Got cheated feeling as coupon didn't mention we cannot redeem for rice & drink. For rice & drink we get charged for 5% server charge. Not worth and food is normal.

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