I’ve been chatty friendly with the teppan pau hawker at our
night market since we moved into the area and my daughter developed a liking
for his pan-grilled flat buns stuffed with pork or coconut. The trader and I
have since gotten on first name basis and we chat over Whatsapp and I know his
son’s eye problems and when his wife got her laptop bag stolen. So of course
when his mother, who helps him out at the teppan pau stall, opened her own
little eating shop, Tan Ee Khai was very excited to share the news with me.
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| Aunty Foong making her pan mee. |
Aunty Foong Café is a little half corner lot in Menjalara
serving old-style Chinese home cooking. Everything is made from scratch, by
hand, and mostly by Ee Khai’s very sweet mum, Madam Foong. The shop began as a
little hawker stall, but soon took on more fixed premises when Foong decided
she was up to the challenge of making more items. The daily offerings include fried
noodles, rice or nasi lemak, with assorted dishes.
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| Basics done well. Meehoon in two variants. |
Don’t expect a lot of
variety. It’s not a mixed rice stall in the sense of the concept. You can
expect some vegetables, curry and a few meats, but not in a huge variety of
styles. What you get is real home-style dishes. One of the most popular is the
stewed pork and hardboiled egg. This simple dish, braised in dark sauce can be
eaten with rice, or with noodles. Aunty’s pan mee is really good, with her
homemade stock soaking into the thick, fluffy noodles. She also adds lots of
vegetables in the bowl, which is great. For RM4, it is a good deal!
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| Piping hot pan mee, soup style. |
 | ||
| Dried pan mee with stewed pork. |
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| Simple and good nasi lemak with chicken curry. |
The nasi lemak is good too. The rice is just right – scented
with the right amount of coconut milk and twinned with enough ginger to give it
fragrance, but without adding that bitter ginger taste to the rice. The sambal
is really good – very balanced in heat and aroma, with a good layering of sweet
and sour. A basic plate of nasi lemak with rice, egg, cucumber, sambal and ikan
bilis is RM2.50. You can add on curry or the stewed pork for up to RM4.50.
Aunty also makes yam rice. Good, old fashioned, earthy
smelling yam rice, characterized by a slight floury feel between mouthfuls, and
the sweetness of shallots which have been mixed into the slightly sauced rice. This
is RM2.50 a plate, add-ons optional.
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| Good ol' red bean soup! |
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| Barley and beancurd skin hot sweet porridge. |
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| Cendol with hand-selected Gula Melaka. |
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| Ice kacang with lovely home-made red beans. |
Aunty Foong Café also offers cold and hot desserts. I’m proud
that my friend probably has the best maintained ice shaving machine in the food
business. He and I have discussed ice quality for shaved ice desserts for so
long, and he makes sure his blades are sharpened every week so that the ice
which it produces is super fine and light as frost. This puts his ice kacang
and cendol way up there with the best. Aunty makes the pink sugar syrup and stewed
red beans for the ice kacang and the purity tells. The aroma of the rose
scented syrup is nostalgic, and the stewed beans are soft yet not mushy. The
gula Melaka for the cendol is bought from a supplier in Melaka and Aunty
actually goes down to handpick her rolls of the soft brown tubes. A tip from
Eek Khai: when buying gula Melaka, look for softness. Hard tubes mean that
refined cane sugar has been added and so the resulting syrup will not be as
brown, or as flavourful. It will be over sweet, with no woodsy scent.
The hot desserts are a rotational series of sweet Chinese
porridges/soups. These include red bean, barley and green bean as well as
really good bubur cha cha when Aunty can find good quality sweet potatoes.
Of course, since Aunty pioneered the teppan pau recipe,
these are sold at Aunty Foong Café too. They range from 90 sen to RM1.30 per
piece and are filled with coconut, red bean, peanut, charsiew pork and sometimes
sambal shrimp (haybee).
Aunty Foong Café
3 Jalan 5/62A Bandar Menjalara
52200 Kepong, Kuala Lumpur
Tel: 018 3787 148
Opening hours: 6.30am to 3pm (depending on how fast the food
goes). Closed on Monday.
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