De Foodland – Crabs Mania!

De Foodland Seafood Restaurant
25 & 27 Jalan 3/62B
Bandar Sri Menjalara
52200 Kuala Lumpur
Tel: 03-6274-4796

Let’s take a break from my gluttony in that Penang trip and divert to more gluttony here in the Klang Valley, hehe!

My dear friend CH was back from Shanghai for a week’s break and it was her final night before flying off. So… dinner with her and family… and she didn’t have enough of Malaysian seafood despite me taking her to South Sea just the previous weekend! So… it was just timely that a few days before this a colleague had mentioned “the restaurant with >30 crab dishes” somewhere in Bandar Menjalara! Thereafter, she even sms’ed me the website link and that’s how we landed up at this crabby place, hehe!

There’s a super clear map in their website and we found our way there easily. We thought we were early… but no, there were already hordes of people there. Best to book your table first if you’re heading there.

CH had to have her unmentionable-shark-anatomy soup and a 4-Season Platter … those were her instructions, besides all the other seafood dishes!

So… this was my bowl of the soup… drizzled with lots of black vinegar, hehe! It was full of fresh crabmeat and not overly starchy.

Within minutes, the 4-Season Platter was served! Service was extraordinarily fast… so much so that we had to ask them to slow down! That’s because there was not enough space on our already-big table as the dishes kept torpedo-ing out!

Those bread-covered fried thingies were exceptionally good… once you bit into them, soft creamy cheese oozed out from the mashed centre of pork, prawn & shrimp paste… lovely. LL had about 3 of these, I think! The yam ring was memorable too – soft fluffy powdery mashed yam fried to a perfect crisp and there were cubes of chicken & pacific clams cooked kungpo style dunked into the middle of the ring. The omelette with shredded vege was rather bland though.

The Taufu with Meenkan (gluten puffs) were braised and served on a pool of oyster-sauce gravy decorated with blanched siewpakchoy at the sides. Nothing fancy – it was good old comfort food – smooth homemade nutritious beancurd, flavoured with just the oyster sauce.

We had a hard time choosing our crabs from their very extensive menu. We were practically drooling over the pictures… and in the end, CH chose their Butter Crabs and Black Stout Crabs.

The plate of heavenly buttery creamy crustaceans hit our table first…
To alleviate the strong creamy taste, generous amounts of crushed black pepper were added… a bit different from the usual chopped chilli padi. The gravy was very thick and completely coated all the pieces of well-cracked crabs…

Yeah, one good thing to note here is that the crabs have been very well cracked, thus there’s absolutely no need for hammers, crab-crackers etc. You can easily and happily suck out every succulent morsel of meat from the crabs… woohooo!

We had 3 rolls of these fried mantou to soak up the thick creamy gravy – not a drop went to waste!

Their vegetables selection featured quite a number of unusual dishes. Besides the usual greens saute’ed in garlic, there were glamorous stuff like bittergourd stir-fried with taugeh! We opted for the more sedate Bittergourd with Salted Eggyolks. And that was precisely what we got…
Thinly-sliced bittergourd (which were not bitter at all) slathered with thick creamy salted eggyolks! As if the Crabs were not laden enough with cholesterol, we had to double/triple whammie with our vegetables – must have ’em salted yolks!!

Fish – must have fish in a seafood restaurant! CH liked the assam-steamed fish in Southsea so much, she wanted more of this… since this was also featured in De Foodland. The tilapia was superfresh with none of the muddy taste… however, I feel the assam gravy lacked ooomph, rendering the dish rather bland. Southsea’s version definitely beat this hands-down! But no worries… they ordered a couple bowls of white rice and polished off the entire fish plus gravy!!

Ahhh… here’s the next crab dish >>> the Black Stout Crabs! Presentation-wise, it was kinda like the marmite-style… and even taste-wise, initially I was misled to think maybe they screwed-up our order and gave us marmite crabs instead. However, upon chewing and sucking on the tasty pieces, it left an unmistakable slightly-bitterish tangy aftertaste on the tongue – the mark of stout!

There are so many other crabby dishes on the menu – I will definitely return to try more… soon, I hope!

My rating: 7.5/10