After touring for almost 9 days, I was beginning to get a little sick of the local food here with all the curry and spices etc. So in Bandung, we decided to check out a really popular area where the whole street were to be filled with lots of Chinese food.
If you’re going to Bandung, you must visit Jalan Sudirman for really really good Chinese food.
Ok alas we didn’t manage to find it. After asking like 15 strangers on the road, and after following their instructions, we found ourselves heading into streets with no sign of any foodstalls! That ranked among one of the most unbelievable ‘navigation gone awry’ of my life.
We ended up on this street where we saw quite a few Chinese restaurants which looked like they all have this thing called ‘Kang Kung Special’ as their signature dishs as stated on their signboards. Out of curiosity we decided to quickly park our car and check that place out.
This is the first time that I’ve actually going to dine at a place because of Kang Kung. I don’t actually dislike the dish though I also don’t find anything much about the dish to rave. I mean if a plate of Kang Kung is nice, most of the time it’s down to the Sambal Belacan more than anything else and most places can whip up a terrific plate of Kang Kung so as I was taking my seat, I wondered how far better can a plate of Kang Kung gets really.
It is interesting to note that a lot of stir fry dishes here uses the word ‘Cah’ to mean stir fry like ‘Cah Kang Kung’. Obviously ‘Cah’ is also a Chinese word to mean stir fry but I’m suspecting it could be adopted from Indo or Malay language along the way, just like if you were to go to China and start telling people you want to eat ‘loti’ for breakfast, they won’t understand because in China bread is called ‘ming bao’ in most dialects.
We went into this restaurant called Mandarin Restaurant which looked like the most authentic of the lot. After looking through the menu, we were to find out that they have many many versions of Kang Kung and the signature dish which is the Kang Kung Special is actually beef stir fry with Kang Kung on hot plate. That sounded really strange for us and so we went for a Kang Kung Polos instead.
Kangkong Polos: 8.5/10 
Polos in Indonesia means plain. So Kang Kung Polos is something that is just plain Kang Kung stir fry. After having too much of belacan and chillis on the run, we decided that we need some real Chinese food. This Kang Kung Polos was quite mean really, it had that terrific ‘wok hei’ smell through and through.
I think very few places can produce Kang Kung of this quality without the help of sambal. The sauce was so good my partner almost finished all of it on her rice.
KKodok Goreng Mentega aka Kung Po Frog Leg: 7.5/10
Seafood Claypot: 8/10
We also ordered a seafood claypot and a Kodok Goreng Mentega(Butter Frog Legs) which I must say was well above par. In the claypot, they actually took the effort to deep fried every seafood like prawns, sotong and fish and you can really tell that they deep fried it on the spot before they chuck into the claypot. Thumbs up for that, it does wonders to an otherwise dull pot of seafood and vegetables.
The Frog Legs aka Tian Ji was one of the best I’ve tried. It was full of that buttery flavour and tasted very much like skinless tender chicken.
And the fact that it’s quite a big plate with at least 15 to 20 legs in it and you know what? This plate only cost us Rp40 000(SGD$5+). In Singapore you’ll be lucky to get 4 legs for SDG$20.
A fullfilling Chinese meal that cost us no more than Rp120 000(SGD$15+) that has seafood and frog legs, of course this can’t be compared to other seafood I had eaten but really, for us to walk into an unknown street in a city where nothing looked familiar, we really can’t ask for more.
Price: Approximately SGD$5+ per dish
Recommendation: Kang Kung Polos
Conclusion: Terrific Kang Kung that was cooked plain. Other dishes like Seafood Claypot and Butter Frog Legs were equally unique. The food here is definitely something that is hard to come by in Singapore.
Likes: Kang Kong.
Dislikes: A little too salty.
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Food: 8/10 Value: 9/10 Service: 7/10 Ambience: 7/10 Cleanliness: 6/10 Overall: 7.5/10 |
