Being in the coastal town of Kuantan, it'd be a shame not to try some seafood. There were quite a number of seafood restaurants around the town, but after our first choice told us that they were fully booked, we settled for Ana Ikan Bakar Petai.
We reached the place at around 7pm, and it was absolutely crowded. The limited parking spaces were full, and we had to park on the roadside at a few hundred meters away. Even with a huge dining area, it was hard to find ourselves an empty table.
The food ordering system here was also quite confusing to any first timer. After some asking around, we finally found out that, to order drinks, rice and other dishes, we would need to get a table first, and wait for a waiter to come to our table and take our orders. And for seafood, we will need to go to a designated seafood ordering area, pick our own seafood (we had chosen a squid and what we believe to be a red snapper), hand them to the weighing station and mention our table number. Definitely not something that you're going to figure out by yourselves.
We ordered Telur Dadar, expecting it to be omelette of some kind, with maybe things like onion, carrot or other fillings mixed into the egg, which is very common for telur dadar in KL area. Alas, it was just plain deep fried egg.
Wanting some vege in our meal, we also ordered Kangkung Goreng Kicap. It was water spinach stir-fried in soy sauce, with garlic and sotong. This dish is surprisingly delicious (or maybe we were just super hungry). The vege were cooked just right and the sotong was very tender. It is something worth recommending.
Next came the sotong, which we had chosen the Salted Egg Sotong, something highly recommended online. They were very generous with the salted egg, and the sotong was well coated with them. The sotong was also cooked very nicely, as they are tender and not too chewy. The dish was quite oily, but it was expected for a salted egg dish.
After a long wait, our Charcoal Grilled Red Snapper with Sambal Petai finally came. To my disappointment, there wouldn't be more than a few petai beans in this dish. The petai beans were cut into slices, along with the hard exterior skin and the inner membrane, something that I had never seen before. On the good side of things, the fish was extremely well marinated and cooked to perfection. The meat was juicy and tender. The black dipping sauce provided, which I initially thought to be just some soy sauce, was surprisingly tasty for its added lemon juice, which goes very well with the fish.
The most damning part of the dining experience here: The long wait time for your food to be served. Rice and other dishes you ordered with the waiter can be served after a 15 to 20 minute wait, but the seafood was prepared excruciatingly slowly. After we finished the fried egg and kangkung, we waited for another 15 minutes or so for the squid to be served, then another 20 minutes for the grilled fish to be finally served. It was such a disheartening experience that I'm not sure if I'm willing to go through another time.
While it was not exactly expensive, the price here was not particularly cheap too, amounting to more than RM60 per person. I'm very confident that I can get food of the same quality at other places with a much better dining experience.
Overall, this is a place where you can enjoy some well cooked and reasonably priced seafood, but the wait time is really a showstopper for me. Perhaps if we came earlier and avoided the crowd we could have had a better...
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