This has to be one of my favourite restaurants in JB for the following reasons:

1. Food is amazing – I love their 泡饭 (rice in broth), and their side dishes are also really good.

2. No need to jostle with massive queues and long waits – while the restaurant is by no means unpopular and has a healthy crowd during meal times, it is relatively less talked about, which meant that I always easily got a table each time I visited. Unlike most of my other travel research, while I never came across this on social media, I found out about this restaurant from a Malaysian friend.

The 泡饭 (paofan, or rice in broth) is definitely a must-order – I have always topped up for their signature broth at their recommendation. If you’ve somehow missed the paofan craze, it’s a dish where the broth and rice are cooked separately but served together, so you still get the distinct taste and texture of rice when you eat it, unlike porridge where the rice is cooked to a mush.

The broth is thick and flavourful, and tasty enough that we always finished the soup to the very last drop.

The crayfish paofan is the recommended one on the menu, and also the one we had today in medium. On my previous visit, we had the mixed seafood paofan in large, when we had 7 people. You can get a sense of the difference in size here:

The paofan was tasty enough that 5 of us (2 adults and 3 kids) could potentially finish a large sized serving, but we were saving our stomachs for dessert and the many more meals we had planned for the rest of this trip.

I did enjoy the crayfish more, because there was a generous serving of crayfish in the pot, and each came with a large firm piece of meat. It was prepared such that it is easy to scrape the meat off the shell, but we struggled a little with the claws. Some of the claws were so small that we didn’t feel it worth our effort to even try to crack it.

All the side dishes we chose were from their Top 10 selection – we’re conservative like that. When on a holiday, we tend to prefer to not risk ruining it over a bad decision on food.

The kids’ favourite was of course the Crispy Lotus Root with Salted Egg Yolk. It’s rich, creamy and salty, and pairs well with the crispy lotus root. The serving looks small but is just nice for our little family of five.

We also ordered the Salt and Pepper Chinese Spinach. We were a little doubtful about how it made it to the top 10, but when it was served, we were pleasantly surprised. Each spinach leaf was coated in batter and individually fried! Unlike what the menu depicted, these were thin crispy fried pieces of spinach leaves so it was definitely full on the flavour front.

I ordered the sweet and sour pork for the kids. It seems to be a fairly recent trend to serve sweet and sour pork on a bed of ice, I’ve had it on a few occasions and I cannot quite appreciate it iced. I’ve learnt the trick to eat it as soon as it’s served, before the ice gets to work on it, and often it’s still hot and nice. In any case, the kids enjoyed it, especially the girls, who like their food cold >_<

The four dishes were pretty much what we ordered this round, as the girls don’t eat much, and we were heading to dessert after this.

However, there were some dishes we tried last December, also from their Top 10, that we thought were pretty good.

Their signature Salted Kampung Chicken was fresh, tender, and juicy. I did enjoy it, although we didn’t order it again because I typically prefer my chicken baked or fried because I’m all about the crispy chicken skin.

We also ordered the Crispy Stuffed Fish Fillet Top with Tobikko. I liked the pairing of the crispy fillet with the wasabi mayonnaise and the tobikko – it’s definitely good but not something hard to find outside. Wasabi mayonnaise and tobikko is already a pretty common combination (e.g. in restaurant or tze char mayonnaise prawns) so we didn’t re-order it this time.

An excellent meal overall, and we will certainly be back to try the other items on the menu.

Address:

7, Jalan Austin Heights 8/3, Taman Mount Austin, 81100 Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia

Location: Sun Gourmet Kitchen on Google Maps