Restaurant 2008 Snow Beer @ Cheras

When my friends in Kuala Lumpur invited us for a dinner at Restaurant 2008 Snow Beer, I had a vision that I will get drunk in the end of dinner. Contrary to my belief, this restaurant not only served good snow beers but also scrumptious dishes.

The restaurant is named after their signature Snow Beer. It looked like an ice blended beer, with a thick layer of crystalised icy beer topping the liquid layer of beer, giving some icy foam feeling when drinking. It does not require any magic to serve these beers, and in fact any beers can be served this way. The trick lies within a chilled bottle of beer and a frozen glass. When the chilled beer is poured on the frozen glass, the liquid beer crystalized to form a solid state. Nevertheless, the effect only last for about 30 seconds.

My friend recommended us Baked Talapia with Sea Salt (RM 38), which comes with an intriguing chinese name - 雪山飞狐. The dish adopt the concept of the renowned Ipoh Salted Chicken, except the content has changed to fish.

The talapia is wrapped with aluminium foil and baked with sea salts, trapping the steam and retaining the moisture during baking, thus rendering the flesh softer. We quite enjoyed the fish as it was fresh and the flesh is intact. It is recommended to remove the fish skin as it tasted bitter and has fingernail alike texture, which is not pleasant to the taste. Moreover, a huge chunk of sea salt of coating the skin, and you would not want to have a sodium overdose night.

Salted Meat (RM 22) is another noteworthy dish. Pieces of pork is deep fried to dark golden colour, and it goes well by eating them with or without company of rice. In fact, it looks like a big size fried lard with the addition of salty taste. Be wary of the fat contents though.

Yin Yang Kailan ( RM 18.00) is something special we have come across. Unlike the other conventional preparation methods, the chef here separated the leaves and stems. With a hint of saltiness, the Kai Lan leaves give a crisp feeling and very appeasing to the tongue. The stems were then fried with oysters sauce to give it a rich taste.

Fried Yee Mee ( RM 8.00 / serving) is always the food we look forward whenever we are in KL or Ipoh. The Yee Mee here is skewed toward saltiness.

Salted / Silver Fish Fried Rice (RM 9.00) is actually fried rice with small anchovies. When we mention small, we really meant it. The anchovies is equivalent to the size of the grains, yet it gave a real boost of saltiness to the fried rice. The fried rice was nicely friend, with the grains clearly separated with each other and retained substantial amount of moisture.

We realize all the food we ordered tonight are somehow salty. Well, this goes well with the beer as the acidity of the beer is being countered by the salt. The chef has secretly implanted the food pairing for all of us.