The real culprit in luring us to the hill city of Ipoh is the Pusing Public Seafood Restaurant! Yes… we took a 3 hour car ride from the wonderful capital of Kuala Lumpur (where nearly the best of everything can be found) just to have dinner in this specific restaurant. Don’t ask me why we did it… it was merely a recommendation from a friend who told us that the Pusing Public Seafood Restaurant (or better known to the locals as Mun Choong) whips up the best prawn dishes.
I have heard stories that the Pusing Public Seafood Restaurant is so popular among the locals in Ipoh that it is packed every night. Not only do families come again and again for its good food, but wedding, birthday and anniversary celebrations are held here on a regular basis. Though the food served at the restaurant is rather on the pricey side, it does not seem to deter the locals from dropping by.
Our dinner reservations were booked for 6.30pm that night, with nearly 20 people in our group (yes, we drove all the way from Kuala Lumpur). We were lucky enough to get a private room all to ourselves, considering the fact that the restaurant was extremely crowded with people. I think there was some sort of celebration going on from the laughing and shouting from one end of the restaurant to the other.
We ordered five dishes that came separately one after the other, which is actually how Chinese dinner is served at functions. Our first dish was the standard Chinese cuisine starter, the Four Seasons dish. The dish comprises four separate rations representing the four seasons. We had fried chicken wings, fried vegetable meat balls coated with nuts, scallops in crab meat sauce and steamed dumplings in oyster sauce, all attractively placed around a large plate decorated with cucumber and a miniature statue of a horse. Our second dish was a popular prawn dish; fried butter prawns arranged neatly around a mountain of fruit salad. Our third and fourth dishes were a vegetable dish and fried dumplings in crab meat tofu sauce respectively. Our last and final dish was the Hokkien style stir fried noodles, which honestly is nothing to shout about.
Overall, the food in the Pusing Public Seafood Restaurant is definitely delicious… and it is worth a visit if you happen to be in the city of Ipoh. Nevertheless, though I did have a wonderful dinner that night, I was not completely bowled over by the food as I felt that I could have had an equally good dinner in Kuala Lumpur, minus the 3 hours traveling.