Vegged Out

On the days my friends from the place I consult at in USJ, Subang, don’t head to our favourite Japanese restaurant, Sumo, we invariably end up at Eru, the vegetarian place a few doors down from Sumo. Service is genial enough, I suppose, but the old pensioner who serves us is more than a little deaf, and the Myanmar wait staff only understand the names of the food dishes and nothing else. Still, my transplanted friends from New Zealand, Yang and Sums, really enjoyed the food when we took them there. And Yang is a pretty good foodie, having worked in restaurants before. 

I have come to a sudden and late realization though. Vegetarian food is not cheap. It is perhaps marginally cheaper than a meal for three at Sumo, but certainly not as cheap as fresh veggies can be.  So I guess we MUST go there for the food.  I’m still trying to ascertain if it is not sheer laziness. 

One thing non Malaysians may not know if that our vegetarian restaurants don’t revolve around vegetables. The menus invariably abound with mango chicken, smoked duck, dried-chilli cuttlefish and sweet sour pork. All of them made with some kind of soy deritive, tofu, bean curd, or variants of carrageen, agar or fungus. It can be strange, like it was strange for my UK friends, Rob and Rachel Arney, the latter who is vegetarian. 

Tastes just like chicken.

I guess it takes skill to make something taste like something else. The only pseudo meat dish I ordered at Eru yesterday was kung po chicken. Or G Ken as the menu calls it. I have to say it was pretty authentic – dark, sticky, dried chilli infused as it was. 

Unpretentious Cantonese noodles. Yum!

I had a yen for noodles so went with the Cantonese fried noodles – completely delicious with real braised veggies, and a delicate nest of vermicelli. Eileen had brown rice to eat with the dishes, and Jess stayed white. 

Our guilty pleasure - butter abalone mushrooms.

We ordered fried butter abalone mushrooms, which are our absolute indulgence. The poor low-calorie mushroom is transformed into a calorie bomb when it is coated with seasoned crumbs, curry leaf and deep-fried green chilies. It is crispy and crunchy and so tasty that one can’t help wonder what really is in that vegan seasoning! 

Bitter gourd.

Amaranth spinach.

The two real vegetable dishes were bitter gourd with black bean (which Eileen shunned for being too bitter!) and a variant of spinach with wolf berries and ginger. 

Jess and I had roselle to drink and both of us thought it was the best offering of this hibiscus-relative that we have tried so far. It had enough sugar to cut the tartness of the cranberry tasting flower, but not so much that the salty-sour flavour was masked. The flowers themselves were still crisp and quite fun to eat – sort of like sweetish Chinese preserved cabbage. 

I had the glutinous rice porridge for dessert which was pretty insipid. Overly thickened with starch, I’m very sure, and with not enough of the pulut hitam. Not to mention a miserable trickle of coconut milk and way too little sugar, and a definite lack of dried longans to add depth. 

The bill came up to RM78 for three.  I have to admit that though we have eaten here quite a bit, I still get taken aback by the prices. It’s a place that’s not really worth the price tag, but it has something other places don’t have. That’s why we keep going I guess.