Here we encountered a very friendly lady owner who recommended what we should eat. The Hunanese/Sichuan menu is all in Chinese, but all you need to do is to point at the pictures of the dishes and order. Frozen Beef Slices looked good, so did the pigs ears. Would we like the Pigs Stomach Stuffed with Chicken Soup? Yes! Then it was the Kah Heong Yook (braised pork), the gizzard and the pei tan or century egg appetizers, and the Sour Vegetable Fish Soup.
First, the thin, lean beef slices sit on a chilli-oil dressing tinged with vinegar and sesame oil, and topped with finely chopped parsley, chilli, sesame seeds and fermented black beans. It added lots of zing to the beef which I liked very much.
The thinly-sliced pigs ears had a good crunch to them, but I wished the dressing had been different from the first. Perhaps we should have detected this from the picture in the menu. Still it made great bites.
The century egg and the gizzard got the same treatment, except for the gizzard there was lots of chopped Chinese celery to give it a little punch. We will get smarter with the ordering the next time.
Our palate was still smarting from the ho! t chilli oil when the black claypot of bubbling soup of pigs stomach stuffed with chicken was served. A pot of good soup in a Chinese meal is always looked forward to. This one was hot and peppery; maybe not as hot as we thought it was because we had eaten a lot of chilli oil and the sting was still with us. I picked out a large white slice of wai san (a mountain herb good for the spleen, kidney and lungs) that was chewy and sticky that had picked up some of the flavours of the soup. It was delicious. There were slices of ginger in the very tasty soup, and dried red dates that seemed to have been added last as they still retained their original sweetness, and texture.
The Braised Pork with Suet Choy had lots of oomph. There was fat and lean in almost equal proportions. The meat tasted creamy and just lovely, after having been marinated, seared in high heat and braised till tender with the suet choy. It had a robust flavour, and its braising sauce made you reach out for a bowl of rice.
The Sour Vegetable Fish Soup was a little disappointing, as we have had an exceptional one at TKS in Jalan Alor. It had all the requisite fish slices, whole garlic, dried chillies and pickled vegetables, yet something was missing. It lacked the balance of sourness with the sweetness of fish and the hotness of chilli.
We realised after a while how Hunanese food differs from Sichuan, though both are quite similar.
I remembered after a meal like this at Xin Dong Tong, LKY and I craved for green tea ice-cream and eventually settled for a pistachio one at home. So do have a dessert to end the meal. Something sweet is perfect after a chilli hot meal. We had the Sue Par or Loh Mei Chee glutinous rice dumplings filled with black sesame paste. These were fried, and coated with honey syrup that crystallised as the dumplings cooled. There was a sweet crunchy exterior, a sticky middle and a fragrant centre from the sesame paste. I had more than one!
Xiang Lin Tian Xia is located at C-1-6 Jalan 3/39A, off Jalan Cheras, 2 mile Warisan City View, Kuala Lumpur.
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