Taste of Foo Chow, Kuala Lumpur

Thanks to Eric, we discovered this place that serves nice Fuzhou cuisines. This restaurant is famous of its Fuzhou delicacies such as Fuzhou fish balls, Fuzhou meesuah in red rice wine, etc.


Fuzhou cuisine: taste is light compared to other styles, often with a mixed sweet and sour taste. Emphasis is also on utilizing soup, and there is a saying in Fuzhou style: One soup can be changed in ten forms.
(Extracted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujian_cuisine)

Red rice vinegar is darker than white rice vinegar, and paler than black rice vinegar, with a distinctive red colour from Red yeast rice (红曲米), which is cultivated with the mold Monascus purpureus. This vinegar has a distinctive flavour of its own due to the red mold.
(Extracted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_vinegar)

Misua, mee sua or miswa, is a very thin variety of salted Chinese noodles made from wheat flour. They differ from mifen and cellophane noodles in that the latter two are made from rice and mung beans, respectively and typically a lot thinner than the two.
(Extracted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misua)

The storefront of the restaurant


The Restaurant - Hup Yick Liquor Shop (?)


Newspaper cuttings promoting the restaurant


A closer view to one of them


The Fuzhou Meesuah in red rice wine


The Fuzhou Meesuah in red rice wine


The menu of the side dishes


The Fuzhou fishball


The dumpling


The fried tofu


If you have tried the meesuah in ginger wine soup before and love it, you should like this. However, this Fuzhou meesuah doesn't have the strong ginger taste. In exchange, it has a nice Chinese wine smell and when you take a sip of the soup down your throat, you would immediately feel the warmth that the Chinese wine brought. The soup is red in colour due to the red rice wine. The meesuah' texture is pretty smooth and still in good form when served. For those who cook meesuah before, they would know that cooking meesuah is no easy task as if the time taken is too long, the meesuah would deform and sticking each other. I think the meesuah used is not the normal type that we could get from supermarket, as it is slightly thicker. As for the soup, the thickness of the soup is just nice, it is not too thick nor too watery. However, it does have pretty strong taste of liquor. The restaurant also offers generous serving of meat (I am not heavy meat-eater, :P) together with the meesuah.

Another specialty of the restaurant would be the Fuzhou fish balls. Fuzhou fish balls ain't ordinary fish balls as there are some meat fillings inside the fish balls. You could say that they are fish paste-coated meat balls too, if you like to. :P Personally, I am not too into fish balls and fish pastes. Thus, I don't have special comments about this. But the combination of meat and fish paste is pretty interesting and fresh to me, as it could soften the taste that the fish paste brought. :P

I strongly suggest those who are interested with the Fuzhou meesuah to dine-in as I once tried with huge eagerness to have a taste of it by asking my housemate to take-away and later re-heated at home. But, the soup become too salty to my liking. Anyway, this restaurant is still high recommended by me, and by fellow food bloggers too.

Other Reviews :
http://masak-masak.blogspot.com/2006/11/fuzhou-food-hup-yick-jalan-yew-pudu.html
http://eatingasia.typepad.com/eatingasia/2007/10/spend-a-bit-of-.html
http://cumidanciki.blogspot.com/2007/06/in-search-of-red-wine-mee-suah-hup-yik.html
http://www.waisikkai.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=429&Itemid=47
http://awhiffoflemongrass.blogspot.com/2007/01/hup-yick-restaurant-taste-of-foochow.html


Address :
Taste of Foochow
14, Jalan Gajah (off Jalan Yew),
Pudu, Kuala Lumpur.

Contact Number :
Tel. 03-9281-8788

Business Hours :
8:30 am - 5:00 pm