Toms Diner

I can punctuate, I truly can! It’s just that the places I eat at have better things to worry about than grammar (or sometimes, food hygiene, but I’ll get to that later). 

A visit to Erin’s Nana and Pops saw us being bundled into the Avanza and driven to Taman Desa to a dim sum place my cousin brought my folks to. It was evidently good enough for dad to chance bringing us there. 

We got there about 11.15am on a Saturday, so there were still a few parking spaces to be had. The eating shop (I cannot and refuse to call these places ‘restaurants’ because truly, they are not! And I am not being uppity – just using words in the right context) was busy but not till overflowing, and we were attended to quickly by a really nice young man. 

Never mind the punctuation, the food is good! 

While Toms Dim Sum specializes in what food writers call Asian Tapas, they also have a goodly selection of one-dish items, all of which looked pretty good. However, since dim sum was the specialty, I did my best to stick to the dim sum part of the menu. 

A relatively clean eating shop. Bar a hair in the food.

I made sure to order the standards, so as to properly judge competence. Of course I also went for the interesting sounding stuff too, just for the balance. 

Fried yam dumpling.

The prawn dumpling (RM4.70) was pretty good, with a thin enough, translucent enough skin. The shrimp in them were pretty decent sized too. The fried yam dumpling (woo kok) was surprisingly the best I have ever had. Usually I avoid this item of dim sum like the plague because they tend to be oil-logged and heavy. Toms’ version was very lightly battered and fluffy, with a moist centre which was very rare. I think it was also because the pork filling was sweeter than most places would make it that made it so palatable to me. However, I did find a hair in one of the pieces, which put me off the dish, even though the server got the helping replaced. 

Mixed meat and century egg porridge.

The mixed meat and egg porridge had good flavour, but I found the porridge too fine for me. I like grainier congee, and the century diced in small pieces, unlike the large wedge in this offering. Still, Erin enjoyed the crunchy pastry flakes which topped the RM7.50 bowl, and I found it very balanced in taste. The lotus seed was a nice touch too. 

I liked the touch of steamed veg on the chee chong fun.

Kit loves Hong Kong chee chong fun and so I ordered two helping of the RM4.70 rice rolls. The sauce was really good – light and tasty (even Erin asked for more), and the rolls were passably smooth, though not silky. However, there were only about three prawns in each dish, folded in the centre. They were large ones though, so I think I can live with that. 

The steamed rice needed more flavour.

The steamed glutinous rice with chicken (loh mai kai) was not too oily, with the grains of glutinous rice steamed to a soft bite. However, the saucing was a bit too mild, and made it insipid. A pity really since the RM4.50 dish was so right in texture. The same can be said for the RM3.80 steamed lotus rice, which came in a little lotus-leaf wrapped parcel. 

Fluffy fried bread.

The fried vegetable buns were pretty good – fluffy, without too much oil absorbed. The yeasty dough made for good smells, but the vegetable filling was a little under-flavoured and did not do justice to the dough. 

Chinese pancake.

The hometown pancake (RM4.70) was a savoury Asian griddle cake. Not so much okonomiyaki, but more like a hot cake with dried shrimp and scallions. 

The cute little yam piggies.

The cute factor was the steamed yam buns. They came in the shape of little orange pigs, with black sesame seed eyes and little hand-shaped snouts and ears. Not only whimsical, they were really well done, with the bread dough being light and fluffy, and the yam filling being smooth and of just the right sweetness. At RM4.50, they were the most visually pleasing item.

Belimbing seafood.

The one non-dim sum dish I ordered was seafood belimbing. Belimbing is that local fruit which grows in clusters on the trunk of the short trees. The little green fruit are very sour and cannot be eaten raw, but are great in a variety of (mostly) Malay sambals. At RM12 I highly recommend this Toms dish. The belimbing was pureed with chillis to make sambal in which four angled beans, petai, fish fillet, squid and prawns were stir-fried in. The balance of flavours was perfect, with it being spicy enough to be more-ish, but not so chilli hot that it became uncomfortable to eat. 

Oriental thirst quencher.

The adults had chrysanthemum tea with ice (RM3 for a pot and RM1 for the ice), while Erin shared the refreshing chestnut and sugar cane drink (RM3) with me. 

Our bill for four adults and one negligible toddler was RM75.39, with a 5% service tax. With the prompt, solicitous service we got, I think the service crew deserved 10%. 

Toms is a place I would go again. It seems that largely the length and breadth of the menu is well-made. I’m planning to try the noodles and desserts the next time we go.

Toms Dim Sum

11 Plaza Danau 2

Jalan 5/109F, Off Old Klang Road

Taman Danau Desa 58100 Kuala Lumpur.

Tel: 03 7983 1686

Hours: Mon-Sat 8.30am-12am; Sun 8.30am-4.30pm

A Better Class Of Pizza

In a clear example of getting what you pay for, I have found the brand of frozen pizzas which are as near to hand –tossed freshness as can be. I began eating this brand in my 20s, when my dad found it in a more up market supermarket. Over the years I have tried other local and imported frozen pizzas, but none come as close. 

Perhaps it is the fact that I prefer thin crust pizzas to the hand-tossed variety or even the regular deep dish or pan type. Maybe it is because I think chicken loaf and pineapple masquerading as Hawaiian is awful. Whatever it is, Dr Oetker is my kind of pizza. 

I like that it comes in classic, real Italian variants, such as the four cheese and mushrooms. My favourite of all is, however, the spinach variant. It feels like a good tradeoff between convenience and slow food, since there is really some vegetable on it. 

Since Dr Oetker is one of the more expensive pizza brands in the frozen food section, I stock up when there is an offer. This last spinach pizza came from a batch purchased at Giant where there was a BOFO (Buy One Free One) offer. 

I hoard them in my freezer till bad days drive me to heat up the Rubine and treat myself to a good pizza. And boy, was this good! 

It was so good, I actually went on to buy spinach and cook it for a home-made spinach pizza – part of a batch of six we made for friends this week. Of the variants (wasabi mayo with shrimp, herbed tomato with salami, barbecue sauce with salami and onions, garlic butter and cheese), the spinach one came up tops, which made me one happy puppy since my efforts at washing sand and grit, and plucking the leaves from the stems went down so well.

You Get What You Pay For

I’m always on the lookout for Me-Too products. In Marketing jargon, a Me-Too product is one which cashes in on similarities to an existing, popular product. Many times, in the food business, especially, Me-Toos can be quite a bit cheaper and pretty acceptable in taste – such as a local brand of peanut butter and jelly which is completely comparable to Goober Grape.

In the recent past I have tried some pretty good locally manufactured biscuits and snacks. So I was hopeful when I picked up this packet of vanilla wafer fingers. With a colour scheme very near to the Loacker brand of wafers, I was hopeful I would get the same taste with a much smaller price tag. Unfortunately though, this was not one of those good Me-Toos. 

While the wafer shell was decent enough, the vanilla cream was pretty bad. A solid, oily cake of pseudo cream coated the mouth like Enron oil on a duck’s feathers. The vanilla flavour was passable, but getting past the coated up gunk was not pleasurable. Even at RM1.99, this is not something I will be buying again.

Longan Longings

Globalization has made it possible to get a lot of fruit year round. Australia, Africa, China enable us to have apples year-round, while American blueberries are replaced by Argentinean ones when the Pacific season has ended. It makes me a little sad, really. 

The year is no longer so neatly divided into food or fruit seasons any more. Mangoes are now good year-round, thanks to Australia (again), India, Thailand and Indonesia. Durians are not reserved for the dry season any more. 

So it was that I was glad to actually see a fruit I don’t see much of year round.  I used to love longans (also called mata kuching or dragon’s eye), and waited with eagerness for the lychee season because lychees always seemed to herald longans when I was growing up. Of late, however, I have eaten more canned longans than the fresh variety. Not by choice, really, they were served to me. I did not go out seeking them. 

Anyway, my favourite local fruit guy (as compared to the international or non-Asian fruit guy) had bunches of fresh longans at the night market today. They were RM6 a kilo. I bought a bunch for nostalgia and because Erin needs to know what food looks like in their natural state.

She was pretty interested. She liked the new taste, having only had canned longans before. She particularly liked the round, black seeds and had fun popping them into her cup of water. 

They're not very pretty, aren't they?

I, however, though I think longans are one of the most interesting tasting fruit in the world, no longer am as mad for them as I used to be. For one, now that I have to clean up after everyone in my own household, I find the woody branches and twigs to be full of dried leaves and mud which fall everywhere. The sandiness of the skins also makes me worry about transfer of bio-dirt onto the surface of the peeled fruit. 

Then there is the taste range. There can be, from one bunch, a gamut of sweetness levels, not to mention a wide difference in the water content of the fruit. Some are juicy (never as juicy as lychees, which, for the record, I do not like), and some are bone dry. When juicy, the sweetness is not the light sweetness of, say, a pineapple, but this thick, syrupy, nearly harsh sweetness which makes me stop eating after ten or so. 

I have yet to find a way to make that nearly cloying sweetness work in cooked food. I’m thinking Cornish hens stuffed with longans, or perhaps, our local quail stuffed with diced longans and some pilaf rice with turmeric and cinnamon… I’ll keep you posted, but the longan season is still a short one…