Munchie Adventure: JB Malaysian Cuisine 我來也, Burnaby

Brought my car in for an oil change one day and was in the Metrotown area, so under my aunt's recommendation, went to a tiny little restaurant called JB Malaysian. It wasn't actually that close to Metrotown, about 3-4 blocks away (if I remembered right), and tucked away behind HSBC (as I was walking to it).


Restaurant: JB Malaysian Cuisine
Location: 5212 Kingsway, Burnaby
Cuisine: Malaysian
Price range: less than $15 per dish for lunch
Date of visit: February 22, 2012

Atmosphere: 2/5
Staff/service: 2/5
Food variety: 2.5/5
Food quality: 2.75/5
Buck worthy? 3.75/5

I have to admit, I might be a bit biased because of the restaurant setting, it looked very old-fashioned (a little dirty-looking) inside, and not a lot of tables. When I went, there were two tables with people, and about 5 empty ones. The server looked very insincere, and her attitude showed it too, as if she didn't want to be there. She told us to sit anywhere, but none of the tables farther away from the door (it was windy and cold, so I didn't want to sit right by the door) looked available. We ended up clearing off a table with newspapers (ourselves!) and finally sat down. She brought us tea, which tasted funny-- there was this weird taste to it that I can't quite describe. But when she refilled our tea, I guessed why it tasted funny. Instead of using a teapot to refill our tea, she had this small plastic measuring cup (the 250mL kind), and took three trips to fill all our cups (there were three of us). I didn't mind that too much, but it looks bad, and she never said excuse me or anything when she just pushed between my parents to fill the tea... rather rude if you ask me.

Ok, that was just a lot of complaining about things that shouldn't be the highlight of this page. The food. We didn't know what to order, so we just ordered what we saw the other people were having. There were lunch specials and normal size versions of the dishes, so we ordered from the lunch menu, since it was a little cheaper.

First dish that came, Singaporean Laksa ($7.50):

 This wasn't anything special, you have your shrimp, tofu puffs, fish balls, squid, and noodles in the curry soup. It was a bit on the spicy side (as you'll come to know I can't handle spicy ^^") This turned out to be the best thing we ordered, but it was only mediocre.

Next was the Hainan Chicken ($7.50):

Glad I got a picture in before the rice collapsed-- which usually isn't a good sign. The rice itself was rather broken up, and wasn't cooked very well. The chicken was ok, but seemed like it had been there for a while. The meat was too tender-- almost to the point of over-tenderized. Taste was ok, accompanying carrots and daikon were too sour though.

Then came the Penang Fried Kway Teow ($10):

It didn't taste like the Kuitui one would get at Cantonese restaurants, this one had a soy-sauce base, and there were prawns, pork, fish sticks, scallions, carrots, egg, and bean sprouts with the flat rice noodles. This was ok, except a bit on the oily side.

Most memorable and enjoyable thing at this restaurant? The music in the background. They were playing old songs from probably the 60-70s ;) Until next time~ (sorry if this sounded very negative, but I'm trying to be truthful of my view ;D)