KY eats – Kim Ma Chinese Restaurant at Palace of Golden Horses

A few weekends ago a few of us were invited to the recently refurbished Kim Ma Chinese Restaurant at Palace of Golden Horses for a food review session. The restaurant seats 120 pax with 5 private rooms.

Decoration oozes the concept of elegance and strength, with poise and beauty that is fitting of their symbol and name of the restaurant, Kim Ma translates to Golden Horse in Mandarin.

Kim Ma Chinese Restaurant, with Chef Roy Wong

The restaurant is led by Chef Roy Wong, the chef de cuisine who does not shun off from experimenting traditional Chinese cuisine with contemporary twist. Chef Roy started his career in 1991 at Frankfriut’s Dynasty China Restaurant at Arabella Sheraton Grand Hotel, and has won multiple awards in the past 23 years or so.

amuse bouche, Chinese style, egg and baked oyster

We started the session with a couple “amuse-bouche” in the form of slow boiled egg and baked oyster. The egg was topped with a shimeji mushroom and a dash of truffle flavour, I love it.

The baked fresh oyster topped with mayonnaise and other ingredients,  a rich and fresh treat.

signature dimsum, including steamed prawn dumplings with truffle

We then proceeded to try their dimsum. 

The two Signature dimsum were prawn meat and black mushroom topped with truffle, steamed chicken roll with morel mushrooms.

The prawn dimsum garnished with shrimp roe and spring onion, I really liked the extra character provided by the truffle. Classy and delicious. The combination of fried yam stick and beancurd with chicken also proved to be a good formula, it was good enough I didn’t miss the lack of pork in this particular dimsum.

The third dimsum we had was from their Healthy dimsum section - steamed angled luffa dumplings with superior broth. The texture of this dimsum was quite unique, and reminded me of fish maw to be honest, quite delicious.

deep fried abalone with grouper fish paste

Next up was a pretty fancy dish created by Chef Roy for the first time, deep fried abalone with grouper fish paste, caviar and served with homemade beancurd.

While visually I thought it looked like those fried ice cream, the taste couldn’t have been more different. The combination of grouper fish paste with braised abalone was superb, and I also really liked the home-made beancurd that was super soft. The caviar on top gave it that extra oomph as well.

However, the sauce used in this dish turned out to be too strong. It was fitting for the tofu, but overpowering the fish paste and abalone. Chef took our comments and promised that he will revise the dish.

more dimsum, village chicken broth with fish maw

No Chinese course meal is complete without soup, so for this purpose we were served the village chicken broth with fish maw. The broth is thick and has a slight creamy taste to it that can only achieve from steaming the whole chicken for hours.

The scallop and prawn dumpling in the soup was not bad either, but what I really love was that piece of high quality fish maw, with the consistency of foie gras, tofu, and beef tendon all mixed together. I can have this everyday.

congee with cod fish and century egg

Congee with cod fish and century egg is your usual dimsum style porridge, but this time with the higher quality cod fish instead of the usual unidentifiable “white fish fillet”.

Chinese style ravioli

Chef Wong then served us this perfectly East-meets-West dish – a Chinese style ravioli stuffed with minced chicken and topped with deep fried vege treated with charcoal powder. It was quite an interesting twist but ultimately I think a type of meat with more fat (ie: pork) would make this dish better.

double boiled whole coconut with almond and snow jelly

Our dessert was double boiled whole coconut with almond and snow jelly.

The chef combined three types of almond to create this dish – the “bei” (North) almond, “nan” (South) almond, and American almond. With the aroma of coconut and the sweetness of almond, this hot dessert proved to be a perfect ending to our meal.

A note for potential Muslim diners, this dessert comes with snow jelly, or hasma, which is a product from frog.

mentalist Zlwin Chew. performing every Thursday to Sunday

On every Thursday to Sunday, renowned mentalist Zlwin Chew performs at the Kim Ma and other restaurants at Palace of Golden Horses. I won’t spoil it for you, but the guy’s got quite an impressive array of tricks.

Address:
Palace of Golden Horses
Jalan Kuda Emas,
Mines Wellness City,
43300 Seri Kembangan
Selangor
GPS: 3.046927,101.709341
Tel: 03-8943 2666
Hours: weekdays 12-2:30pm, 6:30-10:30pm (reservation only). Weekends 10am-4pm