PUCHONG, Dec 13 — If you love steamed fish — prepared simply and well — where freshness is paramount, hit up the newly-opened Restoran Shan Town Seafood.
It's run by former restaurant chef Choy Thian Che. Previously he worked at Ipoh's Overseas Restaurant and another Chinese restaurant in Klang.
This new venture has him partnering with Alice who once worked at Overseas Restaurant Jalan Imbi branch as one of the restaurant managers.
As it's only about two weeks old, the restaurant is currently relying on word of mouth recommendations,
Housed in a food court, this place offers reasonable prices for its fish that are kept in tanks. There's a variety with different price ranges to suit your budget including tilapia, bamboo fish or soon hock, as well as white moustached catfish or pak sou kong.
The highlight is the much sought after sultan fish or ikan jelawat. The river fish is desirable for its soft and slightly sweet-tasting flesh with a fatty layer.
Usually this fish can put a hefty dent in your pocket as it's sold for more than RM300 to RM400 per kilogram. At this place, they are offering RM110 per kilogram. As the fish may not be available all the time, you will need to pre-book the fish at least a day before.
It's worth pre-ordering as the fish is superb. We had ordered a hefty two kilogram fish for the five of us. This was steamed with preserved radish, a signature style of the chef. Here the radish is deep fried till crispy, which added a nice, subtle touch to the fish with its soy sauce. The fish was relished from head to tail.
Not only is the texture of fish unusual but you can also eat the fish scales. On its own, the scales have a slightly hard bite. The chef will remove all the fish scales and batter them to be deep fried till they resemble potato chips! Those crunchy bites are addictive as they are tossed in a salt and pepper mixture.
We also ordered other dishes. As the highlight was the fish, the other dishes were smaller portions.
Their Peking style pork ribs (RM28) was good. The ribs are served in this sticky deep red coloured sauce. Reminiscent of a sweet and sour sauce but this one is a little sweeter rather than tangy.
The ribs are one of their special dishes which includes fish head curry. There are also claypot dishes such as cuttlefish pork slices served in a claypot, and braised peanut pigtail. There's also their signature black pepper cheese crabs. This would be a pre-order item as I didn't spot any crabs there.
Another recommended item is their salted egg mantis prawns for RM35. These softer textured prawns are encased in a crunchy batter and doused with salted egg yolk. Just be careful as there are hidden "spice bombs" in the form of chopped chilli padi in the dish. Bite into one and your mouth is set on fire.
For greens, you get to select from what they have to offer. We chose baby long beans stir fried with garlic (RM18) which came with sliced carrots and onions.
On the menu, they also offer a variety of one-dish items for RM10 or RM13. The RM10 items are a selection of various fried noodles and their fried rice served with ikan bilis. You have fried mee sua and moonlight kuey teow. There's two types of loh shu fan dishes, one with sambal and another with black pepper.
If you pick the RM13 selection, there are prawn dishes such as wat tan hor, fried rice, Cantonese sang meen or double prawns fried tang hoon. If you prefer yee mee, they also do a version of wat tan hor with that type of noodles. They can also cook up a claypot lou shu fan.
As they just started business, the fishes are limited in stock so it's best to call ahead to ask for your items. Currently the two of them manage the place together with one helper as they are still looking for staff.
There's no signboard too for this place but just walk through the entrance and turn right. You can spot the eatery by its rows of tanks with various fishes on one side of the food court which is near the yau char kwai stall.
Restoran Shan Town Seafood, Medan Selera Everyday Foodcourt, Jalan Bandar 1, Pusat Bandar Puchong, Puchong. Open daily: 5.30pm to 12am. Last order is 11.30am. Tel:+6010-8897698 (Alice).
* A previous version of this story contained an error which has since been corrected.
