Its food and beverage Chinese chef Chin Hock Seng said he refrained from using monosodium glutamate as flavour enhancer.
The tasty dishes are a result of natural seasonings and long hours of preparation for the taste of the ingredients to come together.
Take the Cheng Ho Special Double Boiled Black Chicken Soup for example, the stock is boiled for eight hours.
“I use old chicken and chicken feet for the stock. The chicken feet are great source of collagen,” Chin said.
The stock is then used to boil a few other ingredients, such as black chicken, bamboo piths, mushrooms, dried scallops and abalone.
This soup is featured in one of the four Chinese New Year set menus introduced by Cheng Ho Court this year.
Priced at RM888++, RM1,088++, RM1,288+ and RM1,688++ for a table of 10, the sets are available from now until the 15th day of the Lunar New Year.
Creative: Dragon Otak-Otak Chicken is bite-sized delights featuring deboned chicken stuffed with fish paste and otak-otak.
In addition to that, the restaurant has also prepared five variants of yee sang, including vegetarian, abalone, salmon, abalone and salmon, and salmon and snow pear.
The colourful strands of ingredients in the Salmon and Snow Pear Loh Sang are shredded carrot, pumpkin, sweet potatoes and turnip while the sauce is concocted with honey, sour plum sauce and juices of lime, orange and lemon.
Knowing people’s tendency to over-indulge in meat during the Chinese New Year, Chin introduced a unique dish to replace the usual roasted or steamed whole chicken.
For the Dragon Otak-Otak Chicken, the chicken is deboned, air-dried and then stuffed with a mixture of fish paste and otak-otak.
Almond flakes are arranged on the chicken before it is deep-fried and cut to bite-sized.
Out of the four sets, Chin singled out the RM1,288++ set as the excellent value-for-money combination.
In addition to the aforementioned, other dishes available in the set include Steamed Cod Fish with Soy Sauce, Baked King Prawns with Garlic and Cheese, Cheng Ho Braised Mixed Dried Seafood with Clay Pot Sadri and Abalone Seafood Fried Rice with Pine Seed.
Steamed Cod Fish with Soy Sauce was thoroughly enjoyable thanks to its springy texture complemented by the fragrance of garlic oil. Baked King Prawns with Garlic and Cheese, which has a western influence, won over our palates.
Served in thin egg omelette, the Abalone Seafood Fried Rice is topped with a generous amount of toasted pine nuts that lent a mild aroma to the dish.
Must-have: The colourful strands of ingredients in the Salmon and Snow Pear Loh Sang are shredded carrot, pumpkin, sweet potatoes and turnip.
A staple of Chinese New Year feast, dried oyster (hou si) and sea moss (fatt choy) are featured in the Cheng Ho Braised Mixed Dried Seafood with Clay Pot Sadri together with dried scallop, fish maw, sea cucumber and broccoli.
For desserts, Double Boiled Mixed Fruit Sago and Almond Beancurd and Fancy Duet were served.
The former has cubes of almond beancurd and fruits in sweet soup, while the latter is a combination of steamed sticky rice cake coated with chopped peanut and deep-fried sticky rice cake.
The sticky rice cake is made by Chin with glutinous rice, brown sugar and pumpkin.
Meanwhile, Chin also recommended the Baked Green Lobster with Coconut Cheese, which is available in the RM1,688++ set.
“The creamy sauce is made of coconut milk, cheese and evaporated milk,” he revealed.
It is worthy to note that the restaurant has a no shark’s fin policy, hence the delicacy is not featured in the Chinese New Year set menus.
This is the writer’s personal observation and is not an endorsement by StarMetro.
