FULL STEAM AHEAD AT XIN CUISINE

Steamboat is Malaysia's equivalent to hot pot and shabu shabu. My first encounter with this heartwarming speciality was outside Stadium Negara where diners sat under the stars on a grassy verge, tending patiently to their charcoal-fuelled steamboat pots. Today, the experience can be as basic or as classy as you desire. If you prefer to enjoy this perennial offering in air-conditioned comfort with top quality ingredients, Xin Cuisine is just the place to go.

A choice of chicken or herbal soup or interestingly, curry gravy is available as the base stock upon which your steamboat affair can be built on. Priced at RM50 nett per person (minimum two persons per table) and served on Mon-Fri, the variety and quality standards of choice ingredients used are uncompromisingly high.

 

Now, this is no empty boast as I can assure you each and every time has came under the strict purview of the hotel General Manager, Gary Lee whose discerning, finicky tastebud is the final determining yardstick.

Hence the extensive selection veers from choice cuts of chicken and fish, paper-thin slices of pork streaked with some fat, crunchy jellyfish, spongy fish maw, sliced top shell and cuttlefish, and decent sized tiger prawns.

Instead of commercial, mass produced fish balls, the Xin culinary team proffers bouncy fish balls flecked with seamoss and plump sui kow dumplings stuffed with minced pork and prawns.

Lending balance to the meaty fare are smooth soft beancurd along with deep-fried beancurd skin (foochuk), button mushroom and greens: young cabbage, spinach, Chinese cabbage, lettuce in addition to some egg noodles and eggs.

 

Plain chicken stock is best should you wish to appreciate the natural sweetness and taste of the various ingredients. For additional 'oompph', try ramping up the flavour quotient with the house Chinese herbal broth. Xin also offers three sauce concoctions to enliven the cooked morsels. It was fun to experiment and dip different ingredients into them, to decide which had more appeal. 

 

Special mention must be made of the curry gravy. Granted, it is a somewhat unusual choice since curry has such a rich and robustly strong profile but in this case, Xin managed to strike a delicious balance. We found the curry gravy so irresistible that our dining party had no qualms tossing most of the ingredients into it. The resultant taste was raveworthy enough to entice us into slurping up bowls of that broth.

For reservations, please call Xin Cuisine, tel: 03-2144 8750 or 2144 2200 x 2338. Address: Lobby Level, Concorde Hotel KL, 2 Jalan Sultan Ismail, 50250 Kuala Lumpur