Johor Seafood at Tian Lai 天来 in Gelang Patah - Third Visit

This was my third visit to Tian Lai 天来 in Gelang Patah. The restaurants at Gelang Patah are just a short drive from LEGOLAND or Puteri Harbour. I picked Tian Lai tonight mainly for the crabs here and it was good the previous two times I was here. 

Here's my first and second visits to Tian Lai 天来 Seafood Garden. This third visit turn out a little differently.

As we were here mainly for the crabs, we ordered two types of cooking styles, one Tian Lai's signature sambal crab and the other, the popular black pepper crab.

We ordered female crabs at RM100 per kilo.



Our sambal crab came in a heap smothered with thick mildly spicy, sweet and savoury gravy. The flavours were thick and strong.

This crab did not have any roe.



The crab was fresh and quite meaty though it was not fully filled out.



Our crab cooked with black pepper sauce.

There was no roe with this crab too.

The claws came smashed up and one was noticeably smaller than the other. Nearly half the meat was missing from the smashed up claws.



The meat was limp but was rescued by assertive flavours from the rich robust black pepper sauce. The black pepper sauce overwhelmed the flavours from the crab meat and I was unable to detect its natural taste.

We were charged RM200 for the two crabs together.

Here are the other dishes we ordered.



The bitter gourd soup had very little bitter gourd, carrot, button mushroom, pork, fish cake and egg but at RM8 for 5 persons, it was very reasonably priced. The sweet and savoury broth was quite tasty with a discernible lard flavour. 



The simple greens fried with garlic was nicely executed and tasty. A small clutch of greens for RM8.



The lala in "superior broth" at RM22 was laced with quite a lot of Chinese cooking wine. However, the lala were not live but were packed in ice.



My niece wanted chicken wings so we ordered this fried chicken wings marinated in honey and soy sauce. The flavours were robust and likeable but the wings were small and fried till quite dry inside. Price RM2.50 each.

Our total bill of RM281 included the above dishes plus (non alcoholic) drinks, rice and buns.

Restaurant name: Tian Lai 天来 Seafood Garden 
Address: 158, Jalan Leong Bee, Gelang Patah, Johor Bahru, Johor 
Map: http://goo.gl/maps/M2Eyf 
GPS: 1.447316, 103.588199 
Hours: 12:00 noon to 11:00pm (Closed on alternate Mondays)

Non Halal

Written by Tony Boey on 26 Jun 2014

🎗 Opinions in this blog are all my own as no restaurant or stall paid money to be featured