Yuen Kee Home Town Cafe 源記家鄉魚頭米 | Restoran Yuen Kee Home Town Cafe — Restaurant in Petaling Jaya

UPDATE Dec12th 2024

We came to the restaurant thinking to try cabbage again but the lady who fancies herself showed us to our table was exceptionally rude. Nice to everyone else though. (We spoke in Mando Canto and English - she was just rude).

So we went next door for kwong sai food.

— This is a place we sometimes come for lunch IF we have the time. We came today at about 17 April 2024, 1:30pm. It was not crowded. Shocking for a weekday.

We ordered (1) plain rice porridge with (2) pork and ginger, (3) cabage and dried shrimp, (4) egg plant and pork, and (5) a bowl of noodles+fish and (6) a bowl of fish porridge.

THE FOOD Pork fried with ginger - not as good as before. Pork slices were very thick - so there was no flavour.

Fried cabbage with dried prawns - usually very good but today very greasy and too sweet.

Egg plant with pork - it was terrible. Very greasy. Very wet.

Pork pattie/ meat loaf with tung choy - terrible. Oily.

Soup noodles - thick bee hoon +fish: It was left over noodles. Noodles were in bits and pieces. We ate that with a spoon - didn't need chopsticks at all. Not exactly a bowl of food made fresh. The usually good flavourful soup was watered down. Fish - it was okay.

Fish porridge: Okay.

Food today was, bad. Very bad. __

TAPAU/TAKE HOME YOUR LEFTOVERS

We had a lot left over and we requested for doggy bags. We asked if each plate of left over food could be packed into two packets. So everyone could have something, bad as it was, for dinner.

The lady, the one with the glasses on, told us, "of course". She went on to instruct the wait staff. And of course, everything was not packed as we requested.

We noticed she never really took the time to tell them what we wanted. We tried to wave at her but she was very busy on her phone. With another someone else from the kitchen. The young man came out of the kitchen later - so we all noticed. We actually told her nothing was packed as was requested. She never apologized. She just suggested that she re packs for us - Pointless seeing as the staff had already packed everything into big packs and our uncle had driven the car to the entrance.

-- GO NEXT DOOR!! Village Chicken and Kong Sai is GOOOD..

So. I would suggest you to go to Village Chicken (just up the road), or the Kong Sai people next door. Village Chicken does a fantastic sambal sotong. AND a great yam basket. Kong Sai does an amazing chicken rice.. and many different vegetables. In fact, the bak kut teh stall is also pretty good. Ladies and gentlemen, Paramount offers you many options. You do not have to eat rubbish.

The only thing this place does that is consistent is maybe lala porridge.

And do not. DO NOT "tapau" or pack anything home. If you want to pack something, make sure you repeat...

Yuen Kee Home Town Café is a snapshot of Malaysia in all its messy, fragrant, contradictory glory. The kind of place where one table is slurping down milky fish head noodles as if it’s the elixir of life, while at the next, someone is picking suspiciously at a ginger-paste steamed fish head that’s turned an unsettling shade of green. A place where you’ll get both a perfectly wok-kissed plate of sweet potato leaves and a basket of yam stuffed with pork so rich and sticky it deserves its own gospel.

This is dai chow territory: noisy, cramped, unapologetic. Fish dominates the menu, steamed with soy, drowned in curry, fried to a crisp under a glaze of sweet-and-sour technicolour sauce. Some of it will make you weep with joy (the ginger-chilli-padi steamed fish is a knockout), some of it will make you weep for other reasons (fish fillet that never made it past “medium rare”). But that’s the gamble.

Parking’s a nightmare, especially on Sunday nights when the pasar malam descends like an occupying army, but that’s part of the deal. You want comfort, convenience, valet service? Go to a mall. Here, you earn your dinner. And once you sit down, sweating, triumphant, beer sweating beside you, the food arrives fast, hot, and mostly on point.

Service is classic Malaysian-Chinese hospitality: brisk, friendly, occasionally forgetful (allergies? oh sorry, forgot, here’s more raw spring onion). But when the fish head noodle broth is as milky and rich as this, laced with Shaoxing wine that punches you right in the nose, you forgive, you forget.

Not everything sings. There’s MSG lurking in the soup that’ll leave you thirsty, and some days the oil in the fryer’s been pushed one batch too far. But when it’s good, it’s damn good. German pork trotter, lala soup, claypot prawns tangled with glass noodles, marmite chicken, paper-wrapped curry bread: it’s a menu written by someone who wants you fed and happy.

And that’s the beauty of Yuen Kee. It’s not trying to be cool, or clean, or curated. Yuen Kee Home Town Café sits in Petaling Jaya like a stubborn old uncle at the poker table, unmoved, unapologetic, feeding the neighbourhood with the kind of food that doesn’t care what...

I love coming to this place with my husband. I love their food. so I recommend my friend to come to this restaurant. until one day, when I visited with my friend, we place an order. we request what we need one by one. first, my friend requests a fork. so an old auntie brought it to her and as soon as her soup is served, she wanted to share it with me. she requests a bowl. and next, when my other friend's food is also served, she requests sambal. at that moment I also said that I want. at that time an old auntie shows her angry looks and tell us not to request one by one but to request once. I was a little heartbroken. I felt that she is not pleased to serve us as her customer. should we go and get by ourselves so that we don't give burden to her? Does it wrong to request what we need? The restaurant wasn't that busy at that time. There are many empty tables. But are we requesting too much? I hope this review will be read by their staff. and I truly wanted to say sorry for the inconvenience that we brought to her that day. Thank...