Yesterday I had the pleasure to go to a steamboat buffet at Poh Loong Banquet Hall in Teluk Intan. Poh Loong Banquet Hall is formerly Garuda Restaurant, which specialised in Indonesian food. Anyway, it was bought by Poh Loong Restaurant last year and has since converted into a ‘banquet hall’.
Poh Loong Restaurant has apparently put in a lot of effort to modernise and renew its image recently. Part of the effort, I imagine, is to use plenty of English and impress town folks with ‘canggih’ terms. That is probably why the restaurant was named ‘banquet hall’ instead of just another restaurant, although I remain doubtful of the name. The ‘banquet hall’ opened as a steamboat buffet restaurant more than a month ago. Price is per adult RM17.90.
Anyway, the usual story goes. My father’s friend’s birthday and so everyone went there for his celebration. Besides that, there is also a nice 10% cut currently if you can show the discount coupon.
One Stop Steamboat Solution! I’m sure there are a lot of effort to modernise the restaurant’s appeal by using English, but the advertisement manager may want to look into the grammar a bit.
So we arrived at this ‘banquet hall’. There seem to be a lot of people here, given the fact that it was a Tuesday, and economy wasn’t that good recently.
Yeah, there’s really a lot of people around! So I went looking for food.
My god brother who looked very depressed for the purpose of this picture. Don’t be cheated! He was playing with a SE Walkman phone (of an unknown model ‘cos I don’t keep track of SE phones)!
Directly at the centre of all foods is the sauce table. Seem to have a lot of sauces huh? And “Thank you for not wasted!”.
Doesn’t look bad…plenty of variety, majority of them being all kind of balls and meatcakes. Pork balls, big fish balls, small fish balls, salmon fishcakes, etc. Molluscs et. al. seem very much absent, and later I learnt that that was because everyone made clean sweeps everytime they were out from the kitchen.
In the end, I contented myself with these first. Fried chickens. Not that they exist for long. I was luckily the second person to attack these poor fried chicken pieces before everybody else cleaned the tray.
Some dessert. Quite sweet.
I was actually quite satisfied with the food provided (I don’t eat that much molluscs) except the soups. We got ourselves a tom-yam soup and a normal soup. I must say the tom-yam soup is a disappointment. Didn’t taste like one, didn’t smell like one. The normal soup also tasted a bit bland. Soup is such an important part of steamboat, and it should not be omitted in any situation! They probably added too much water to cater to plenty of customers? 
There seems to be side orders as well! Let’s try one of them.
Lobster! Both salad lobster and kam-heong lobster that we ordered actually tasted quite nice. Of course lo, it is lobster ma.
This is actually something I liked best in there. Ice-cream on bread. Prepared by first toasting the bread and then put two scoops of ice-cream on it while hot. Fruits are optional. Yummy. I ate two of these.
And so I left the place in the end with a guilty stomach and 2kg heavier.
Verdict: The tom-yam soup is actually quite disappointing. The shortage of seafood also seemed to be a problem (maybe they’re trying to save costs), but it didn’t bother me since I don’t take seafood much. Food variety is OK. Just remember to sweep at the first opportunity if you really love seafood. Environment good. Image and arrangements good. Service good. Just lots more to improve on, especially food and the soup.
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