I was originally planning to have dim sum at Yee Heong. I wondered if they had that only at the breakfast, most of the time we skipped our breakfast due to big dinner. We would want to try our luck at lunch time, apparently we could ordered dishes at noon but not dim sum. Yee Heong is a Cantonese style restaurant, but it’s not the same Cantonese style we can find in Hong Kong, we can see the local influences in the cooking.
Yee Heong celebrated its first century (it was established back in 1924) by moving from its long-time perch on Campbell Street to a newer, brighter location on Kimberley Street, just one street away but in a much more bustling section of Chinatown, near to the popular night street-food stalls.
Sar hor fun - this is a classic Cantonese dish, consisting of a thick, broad rice noodle which originates from the town of Sar Hor in Tianhe District, Guangzhou, China.
The noodle is often paired with the thinner rice vermicelli (beehoon ) to form the complete dish. Here, the noodles wee stir-fried in lard, light- and dark-soy sauces, and sesame oil, then blanketed with an eggy sauce containing slivers of pork, shrimps, char-siu (Cantonese BBQ pork) and choy sum greens.
This place serves THE BESTsar hor fun in town, even better than the one by sar hor fun specialists, Gou Lou Chao Sar Hor Fun on the next street! Full of wok hei and perfectly textured, their sar hor fun had the right balance of flavors.
We only wished they’d put in more ingredients: pig’s liver, fish-meat, pig’s intestines - now, THAT will make their rendition as good as the ones by the now-defunct, legendary Foo Heong or Seng Kee.
Braised pig’s trotters with rice vermicelli - tasty, but not what we envisaged the dish to be: we’d expected one with an unctuous, gelatinous gravy from long-braising of the pig’s trotters. But over here, the sauce was diluted with a herbal soup.
Braised fish-head with black bean sauce - another classic Cantonese dish, but the one here paled in comparison with the version by Kuala Lumpur’s legendary Sek Yuen, the Grandmama of all retro Cantonese eats in Malaysia and Singapore!
Lo hon choi - braised napa cabbage, shitake mushrooms, baby corn, cauliflower, broccoli and 𝘧𝘶 𝘤𝘩𝘶𝘬 (dried beancurd sticks), flavoured with 𝘯𝘢𝘮 𝘺𝘶𝘦 (red fermented beancurd). Very light-tasting version here.
The rather spartan decor of the new premises. Most of their regular customers were Chinatown denizens who relished Yee Heong’s faithful renditions of traditional, oftentimes retro, rustic Cantonese dishes which are hard to find elsewhere in George Town nowadays.
