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 theoccasionalTaiwanese 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.

< br>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 t! radition al 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.