Saturday, September 24, 2011

Ho Chai Lai - Best Chinese Restaurant this side of Muntinlupa

Our family has this favorite eating place outside of San Pedro but still manageable in distance. It is actually in the next town already which is Muntinlupa.

We have always frequented this place mainly because there's no decent eating places in San Pedro apart from the usual fast food. So whenever there's a special occasion or we're too lazy to cook (which was the case this time), we'd just go here and treat ourselves to great Chinese food.

This time around we ordered the Ho Chai Lai Siomai which is their specialty siomai. Instead of being wrapped in Siomai wrapper, the siomai is wrapped in nori and inside the siomai is the ground pork but it also has crab sticks. The siomai is served in a soup like substance (probably some version of a birds nest soup). We never fail to order this siomai whenever we eat here and I'd actually recommend this to anyone. The flavors are quite unique especially since nori has this fishy smell and taste to it that one gets accustomed to. Even my brother who isn't into Nori likes this. And if my picky-eater brother likes this, am sure everyone else will.

Since it was just me and mom eating together tonight, we decided to just have one hotpot and a small serving of yang chow rice. One of the things that has impressed us about this Chinese restaurant is that they don't scrimp on the ingredients. Even if we just ordered a small portion of the yang chow rice, we still got the proportionate amount of spring onions, chorizo, egg and green peas in the rice.

For our viand, we paired the rice with a seafood hotpot with mushrooms. Of course, since it was a hot pot, it was served to us piping hot which made it really delectable. The seafood in the dish were properly cooked. The shrimp is still juicy, the squid is not rubbery at all. The filets of fish were not overly breaded but just enough to keep it flavorful and flaky. We even found bits of sea cucumber in there which was quite a surprise.

The mushrooms that were in the dish were of two kinds. The wood ear mushrooms (tenga ng daga) and the button mushrooms. Again, there's no scrimping in mushrooms here. We had our fill of properly cooked and delicious mushrooms which we ate with the vegetables accompanying the seafood like carrots, sitsaro and onions.

Eating slowly and talking about lots of things, Mom and I were surprised that we actually finished everything. Yes! We were so full when we were about to leave Ho Chai Lai but we didn't worry. Their complementary house tea did wonders to our tummy.

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