By Eu Hooi Khaw
The banquet hall during the day.Imagine when it is actually used as a banquet hall, it's huge.
DEC 24 — Very often, we try not to have dinner at the Oriental Pavilion in Jaya 33, Petaling Jaya on weekends because there would always be a wedding or a celebration of some sort.
Now that Oriental Banquet has opened practically down the road, it makes things so much easier. Even better, on Sundays and during public holidays, you can have a buffet lunch there, all for RM39+. But it’s so popular that you have to book your table in advance.
It’s an elegant banquet hall that can seat 800, with state-of-the art audio and lighting and “live” feed capabilities. There is even a mezzanine floor with an open balcony and there are private rooms here as well.
An impressive selection of starters.
The dishes are for the most part Chinese, with some Western-style starters, salmon sashimi, lots of boiled prawns and baked mussels. But we found that these were not the most popular. For instance, if you so much as blink when the siu yoke or roast pork is brought out, it’ll be gone! It was the same story with the suckling pig. By the time we got to it, only the head and tail were left.
We like it that there was Peking Duck, with someone at the carving station catering to a long queue of people. You will get your turn; the Peking Duck is well worth the wait. The skin is crispy, and if you just dab the pancake with a little sauce, it’s delicious.
It’s worth exploring the buffet before you go for the more obvious dishes. I loved the pieces of bittergourd coated generously with a salted egg sauce, and the chiu yim (salt and pepper) deepfried eggplant.
I thought the ”Moneybags”made up of of fu chook skin, filled with a Foochow fishball and chopped mushrooms and carrots were superb. The fishball was bouncy and so tasty with the minced pork filling inside.
The fish fillet with pomelo sauce was delightful.
I went for the fried fish fillet with pomelo sauce which everyone should eat if they’ve been having all that roast pork. I’ve had the white tuna fillet before at Oriental Pavilion topped with this sweet, sour and citrusy sauce with fresh pomelo. Here it’s another fish but tastes just as good.
There were two claypots bubbling with goodies inside. We took a look and discovered bak kut teh, and rice wine chicken with black fungus. The bak kut teh could have been more concentrated, but we liked very much the rice wine chicken with lots of ginger and black fungus.
There’s a live station of porridge, and I highly recommend it if you are still hungry. The porridge was so fine and so flavourful with the fish, ginger and other condiments.
We weren’t so taken with the dimsum station, but I had a vegetarian bun. Now where’s my char siu pow? (For me, dimsum is not complete without it.)
We also had some fried woh tip with XO sauce, and if we had stayed a little longer, there would have been fried radish cake as well.
Dessert was an assortment of Nyonya kuih, four flavours of ice-cream, soyabean milk with suet kap and lui sar tong yuen (pulut dumplings filled with black sesame paste and dusted with ground peanut). I went for the last two, waiting for a fresh batch of warm lui sar tong yuen which were so wonderful.
There is just so much you can eat at a buffet. Malaysians by and large still do not behave at such meals. If they like something and think it’s value for money, they would take a whole platter of siu yoke, for instance, to their table.
The buffet includes a shark’s fin soup served at your table.
On weekdays there is a set lunch at RM18, but there are also individual set menus you can choose. For instance, at RM38++ per person (minimum 2 people) you get Braised Shark’s Fin Soup in Fragrant Coconut, Deepfried Honey Spare Ribs with vegetarian Roll, Braised Tianqi Vegetables with Wolfberries and Braised E-Fu Noodles with Tiger Prawns.
There are also RM68++ amd RM88++ per person menus that have six courses.
The annual dinner celebration menus range from RM988 nett to RM1088 and RM1388.
Oriental Banquet is located at 16 Jalan 19/1, 46300 PJ, Tel 03-7957 8488.
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