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Earlier this month, I decided to bring Haze to somewhere quiet and relaxing for a short birthday holiday after a super busy end of 2013.

After a bit of research, I chose picked The Dusun for a night stay, recalling the blogpost kinkybluefairy wrote about the place a couple years ago.

vacation in the rainforest, The Dusun

Dusun translates to plantation in Malay, and this is precisely what this place was, and still is, a small family run resort situated within a durian and other tropical fruits plantation about an hour away from KL city.

Started in 1984 as a private family retreat, the couple turned it into a nature resort in 2009. It started out with two houses, and since expanded to five unique houses  that fits 2-5 adults each.

our room at the Berembun House, with a bathroom and kitchen

Each houses come with bathroom, a private kitchen, BBQ set, and are situated apart from each other. We chose Berembun House for the night as it is closest to one of the two infinity pools at the resort, with an expansive view over the Berembun forrest reserve.

lovely infinity swimming pool

While the chalet style room is only big enough to house a queen size bed and a small furniture somewhat resembling a closet, there’s a huge deck and a big outdoor carved bench to laze about.

There isn’t air condition units nor you really need one at this resort. The Dusun is located about 250 meters above sea level, making it a few Celsius below average and rather windy and comfortable at night.

took a well deserved afternoon swim

The swimming pool too was gorgeous, it isn’t much for swimming laps, but that’s not what we went there for anyway.

After a dipping session while admiring the nature, we also spent some time playing boardgames that’s available with the room. It was a bliss staying away from all that city noise.

dinner was a self-cooked BBQ affair

Being a small resort, The Dusun doesn’t have an in-house restaurant, what they provide tho is a private kitchen at every house and a BBQ pit with charcoal. So for dinner, I marinated some chicken chops and bought along a fish and a couple sweet potato for grilling. We also ended up buying some brinjal and sambal at the local grocery store 5 minutes away.

We had a great dinner under the stars that night, it was awesome.

breakfast and a walk around the fruit plantation

Fortunately, breakfast is included, and we were served coffee, fresh juice, toast, and scrambled eggs the next morning right at the table on our balcony.

We then spent some time walking about the surrounding area before heading back to the reality of city life.

Other activities provided at the resort includes jungle trekking to a nearby waterfall, bird watching, massage, and even fishing trip. For a longer stay, those distractions will be quite welcomed.

I can get used to holidays like this.

Address:
The Dusun
Pantai New Village
Negeri Sembilan
GPS: 2.8018, 102.0151
Web: thedusun.com.my
Email: hello@thedusun.com.my

Thanks to the good people at ROYCE, I got my hands on a few limited edition chocolates slated for their upcoming ROYCE Maccha Fair (available from 1st August, 2013 for limited time) a short while ago. Since Lance invited us for his almost-birthday BBQ party at Genting last week, I took the opportunity to bring those chocolates some 1000 meters above sea level for sharing.

ROYCE Maccha Fair chocolates and the bunch at Genting

I’ve previously wrote an entry on ROYCE chocolate and was impressed with the quality of this chocolate maker from Hokkaido, therefore I was quite keen to sample this latest offering.

While many choose to buy chocolates in duty free shops, ROYCE is one of the very few brands that have their outlets in various malls around Klang Valley (check location here), offering a wide range of chocolate products.

To me, the only downside is that they don’t serve coffee on location since these two goes so well together.

ROYCE Maccha Almond chocolate, Kerol as the model

Anyway, lets talk about these Maccha Fair chocolates.

The Maccha Almond chocolate is pretty self explanatory. Roasted almond coated with green tea flavoured chocolate on the outside. There is something about nuts that always goes well with chocolates, and I think this goes extremely well with beer too.

Lance & Haze with ROYCE’s Prafeuille Chocolat

ROYCE’s Prafeuille Chocolat made by having fragrant green tea sauce sandwiched between light-textured chocolate and mixed with powdered green tea leaves. A box of this contains 30 pieces of chocolates, all individually wrapped.

The taste of green tea is very strong and suppresses the aroma of chocolate somewhat. Whisky did not go well with this, but I believe coffee would be lovely. Kinda reminds me of those minty chocolates you get for Christmas, except this one tastes a whole lot better. Perfect for those who loves green tea, but if you just want the taste of chocolates, this might not suit.

Michael enjoying some ROYCE Nama chocolate – Machha

Then there’s the Nama chocolate, ROYCE’s most famed product. This is one of the smoothest and tastiest chocolate you can get. Laced with a hint of liquor with perfect balance between the aroma of green tea and fragrances of chocolate, this was pretty much everyone’s favorite of the night, including myself.

If calorie intake and money isn’t a problem, I want ROYCE Nama chocolate to be in my fridge at all time. So good!

You can find locations of Royce’ stores in Malaysia from http://www.e-royce.com/english/shop/shopintheworld/malaysia.html and their facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/ROYCEMalaysia

it was Lance’s birthday BBQ celebration, did it like a rock star

Well, the chocolate was just desserts for this awesome BBQ party that we had. Lance made us plenty of awesome BBQ goodness, which includes lamb rack, steak, bacon, mushroom with cheese, chicken, salad, clam chowder, and more.

The birthday cake for the boy was a pavlova cake from Alexis at Bangsar, which is of course, one of the best pavlova cakes you can get (Serai serves pretty good pavlova too).

plenty of drinks, meat, and good times with friends

Mike’s job for the night was handling all the alcohol related drinks since Ee Laine was unable to join us on to night. We had great fun as always, and as always, looking forward to the next session!

As promised on the Taman Desa Japanese BBQ post, here’s how you spend less than 1/4 the money and DIY some pork bbq goodness at home. An awesome BBQ chicken wing recipe is thrown in as well.

This BBQ was done several weeks ago when my sister and my niece were in KL to get their visa application finalised. They have moved to the states now.

pork, chicken wings, vege, we have it all. Kerol & FA working on the grill

pork belly BBQ:

• buy pork belly from the market, I paid RM 25 for about 15 portions of what you’d get from Taman Desa BBQ place, cut them in squares
• marinate with half a cup of cooking sake, 1 tablespoon salt, and 2 tablespoon vinegar
• as for sauce, add chopped garlic to Japanese salad dressing (wafu dressing, shoyu vinegar)
• BBQ on medium heat till cooked

my sister & niece, with a few friends & ex housemates

awesome chicken wing BBQ:

• marinated chicken wings (together with drummets) with 3 parts oyster sauce, 2 parts soya sauce, and 1 part dark soya sauce
• add some pepper to the marinate
• let it marinate for at least half an hour in the fridge, longer = better
• BBQ over medium fire, poke the drummet – no juice coming out = cooked

instax pic with my sister, the niece, and me. =D

Vegetable BBQ:

• er.. just put them on stick and burn away!
• add some salt to serve

That’s it, simple and yummy BBQ. The experiment was a success, will have a bigger BBQ party next time!

Hidden at Taman Desa is a pretty special place, a little shack with the name 大众烧肉 (Japanese BBQ) that seems like it was lifted from one of those Chinese kungfu series of the 80s. A place where the protagonist grabs a few bites while casually kicks about fifteen person’s butt.

Within the small shack there were a few tall tables and benches, and around the area, more tables are available al fresco style. This Japanese BBQ place is a fair weathered restaurant, while there are some areas under the roof, capacity would be quite limited during rainy day, which unfortunately, would also be the best times to have BBQ around here.

small and quaint set up, charcoal fire, alfresco dining – perfect ambience

We were introduced to this place by Terence and Michelle (who speaks Japanese), and decided to pay a visit several weeks ago to check out what the fuss is all about.

On a weekend night, the place was fully packed. We had to wait for some half an hour before a table was available, and another 15-20 minutes before the busy waiters bother to start taking our orders.

the Genghiskhan lamb, pork ramen, and mixed vegetable

Most items on the menu consists of raw meat, but for those who want to lace their stomach while waiting for food to be cooked, they serve 3 types of ramen (RM 10 each), and steamed rice is available at RM 3 per pop too. Kerol tried the ramen and reported that it was acceptable, if not underwhelming.

After we ordered our raw meat, a charcoal stove is set up between the two tables we were seated. Our first dish to go on the stove was Genghiskhan lamb (RM 20), which reminded me a little bit of bulgogi but with chunks of lamb instead. it was pretty tasty and went well with steamed rice, but portion was a little small.

various pork including  pork belly, pork liver, beef short ribs, pork tongue

When our meat finally arrives, we finally realized that “small portion” is a pretty consistent issue here.

Pork belly, shoulder loin, inside leg, neck and big intestine are priced at RM 10 per plate, while tongue, throat, liver, heart, stomach, and small intestine at RM 6 per plate. The slightly bigger plate beef short ribs was RM 15.

We didn’t order steak (RM 25) or beef brisket, ribeye, tongue (RM 10 each) though, so can’t comment on the portion.

here’s four more other types of pork, including belly, shoulder loin, neck

The meat could take a bit of time to grill, but the result was mostly positive, with the pork belly especially superb! Those layer of pork fat in between the meat were succulent and yummy (if you don’t mess up and over cooked it lah).

I’m pretty partial to the leaner cut of meat, and pork stomach (tripe) was a bit too tough to chew after grilling, I guess that’s a part of pork that’s best left stewed or cooked in soup.

we only had one stove for seven of us though

Dining at Gerai Makan Japanese BBQ can be pretty cool, there isn’t another place that let you grill your pork with charcoal fire in that rustic environment anywhere in Klang Valley that I’m aware of.

The problem though, was that of price and service. If you really want to have a satisfying dinner, expect to dig in quite a bit to your wallet and spend at least a couple hours there.

Yuki, Horng, KY, Kerol, Michelle, Ah Chan, Ruby, Haze (saw BangsarBabe there too)

While I am probably never going to be a regular customer there, it’s a cool place to be once in a blue moon (they do serve pretty cheap beer, including Asahi). We also took the idea and made our own pork BBQ, I’ll share that on this space soon.

Address:
Japanese BBQ
Center Court Plaza Faber,
Jalan Desa Jaya Taman Desa
Off. Jalan Klang Lama
58100 Kuala Lumpur
GPS: 3.1065905 , 101.6783134

In the past few years, quite a number of restaurants that has a primarily pork laden menu with good choices of beer (and wine) selections rose to prominence. Some of the more well known players are Brussels at Solaris & Jaya One, Berlin Biergarten at Solaris Mont Kiara, Weissbrau at Pavilion KL, Hoofed at TTDI, Racks at Changkat, Sid’s pub at TTDI/Bangsar South, and Jarrod and Rawlins at a few locations.

Now, it looks like the same trend is happening in Penang, one of the latest of such establishments is BeerBQ at Precinct 10 (right next to Island Plaza).

Beer BQ at Precinct 10, next to Island Plaza in Penang

First, a disclaimer. Two of my ex schoolmates are share holders of this restaurant, and they invited me to this review session. I’ve known these blokes for the past 20 odd years, they told me to treat this with honesty, like any other review, which I will gladly comply.

I like Precinct 10, it is a brand new commercial center that reminds me of suburban US. The shops are aligned in U shape with ample of parking in the middle. That way you never need to have a very long walk to any outlets. Most commercial areas packed in too many shop units with too little parking space, this place is a fresh departure from those greedy developer’s SOP.

wild mushroom soup, cauliflower soup, caesar salad

Now to the food. Together with mom, sister, brother, Haze, and Horng, we had the restaurant manager recommended us some of their signature dishes to share.

We started off with some complimentary bread, with plenty of butter.

Then the soups: Wild mushroom soup (RM m9.90) has all those chunky bits of mushroom which I like, and soup of the day (RM 7.90) that night was cauliflower soup with very smooth texture and slightly “strange” taste to me, but Haze and my siblings absolutely loved.

The Caesar salad (RM 15.90) has bacon, croutons, and chunks of Parmesan cheese in it, and was easily one of the best Caesar salad I’ve ever had. I’m not sure if this is the best for someone who’s on diet, but it was awesome!

buffalo wings, roast pork, smoked salmon salad

What’s a beer place without some good old beer food?

We tried their Buffalo Wings (RM 15.90) which has quite a kick, they were strongly flavored with homemade Hot BeerBQ sauce and really does go well with beer. Comes with Blue cheese dressing too!

Anyone who loves roast pork (RM 16.90) would agree that this is always the perfect finger food to go with beer. While I did find the skin for the roast pork a tad too chewy, it was overall still plenty satisfactory. They suggested Stella Artois to go with this, but I think any beer would work!

We also had the smoked salmon salad (RM 19.90) that came with home made cheese sauce. This is a dish most suited for those who are really on diet. Tastes decent.

BeerBQ pork ribs – succulent and yummy

Then we moved on to the real deal, the BeerBQ pork ribs (RM 38.90). Drenched in their signature BeerBQ sauce and very well marinated, this rack of ribs was tender and absolutely flavorful. If you have already order some starters, I recommend sharing this dish, the portion is rather generous for the price.

This is one of the better ribs I had.

BeerBQ seafood platter, fish and chips, brownies

Another main dish that we shared was the seafood platter (RM 40.90). There were king prawns, squid, mussels, clams, and even scallops. While the ingredients were superb, the platter is covered in the same BeerBQ sauce that I thought suited the ribs perfectly, but not quite well with seafood. It was a decent dish though, but I think perhaps the standard bread & fry preparation might work better here. Especially if you’ve already ordered the ribs.

My mom had a serving of fish and chips (RM 21.90), and she liked it. Mom helped sell fish at the market in the morning, so if she says that the fish is good, it is good.

At this point, we were pretty much stuffed, but was convinced to try their brownies (RM 8.90). We ended up finishing it in about all of 20 seconds, the brownies was top notch.

brother, sister, haze, myself, mom, and horng

Other than the dishes we tried, BeerBQ also serves five pasta dishes, rib eyes, grilled salmon, chicken chops, beef ribs, and lamb rack. Other beef food includes fries, calamari, fish fingers, and onion rings.

This is a real restaurant that does concentrate on their food instead of a beer place that “oh by the way we” also serves some food.

Konig Ludwig Weissbier, Franzishaner, Konig Ludwig Dunkel, Leffe

As for beer, there’s Hoegaarden, Carlsberg, and Franziskaner Weissbier on tap. On bottles they serve Konig, Franzishaner, Leffe, Stella, Budweiser, Erdinger, Beck’s, Lowenbrau, and more.

So if you’re looking for porky goodness and a cold one to spend the evening, this is a place to go in Penang.

Address:
BeerBQ Bistro
Precinct 10
Jalan Tanjung Tokong
10470 Penang
GPS: 5.449262, 100.305524
Tel: 04-890 5157
Web: https://www.facebook.com/beerbqbistro