Kway Teow Kia 📍 Restoran Tong Seng Coffee Shop • Taman Ungku Tun Aminah 東成茶餐室 果条仔 ☎ +6011 6204 3695

Kway_Teow_Kia_Tong_Seng_Tun_Aminah_東成茶餐室_果条仔

Passed by Tong Seng coffee shop a few times before while stalking Taman Ungku Tun Aminah in Skudai, Johor for good eats. Small corner coffee shop, they have wanton mee, yong tau foo, chee cheong fun, lei cha, porridge, mee hoon kueh, KL fried Hokkien mee, chicken rice, and this kway teow kia stall. All little independent stalls with their own hawker bosses, so most put their heart and soul into their own businesses.

Restoran Tong Seng is a dingy back street coffee shop in Taman Ungku Tun Aminah far from JB's tourist belts.

Actually, about 15km from downtown JB nia nia.

Luong Ngoc Huong has been running this kway teow kia stall for 6 months now. He took over from the previous owner, his master who ran the stall for over twenty years.

Typical of Vietnamese, Luong is enterprising and willing to learn and adapt. Instead of selling pho or banh mi only, they are willing to step out of their comfort zone and sell local staples. They learned and are proficient in Mandarin and Bahasa Malaysia as well.

A quick peek into what's in the kway teow kia stall window. Luong has everything (i.e. "exotic" unker stuff) I want and they looked well browned, done nicely.

Let's have this for breakfast 😋

I appreciate me time, in a hyperlocal corner of anywhere.

RM12 for pork belly, pork tongue, large intestine, skin and a bowl of kway teow kia noodles in soup.

I like how the fried garlic bits Luong sprinkled over the noodles and pork added flavour and aroma to the dish.

The brown soup tasted of Chinese spice, soy sauce savouriness and a discernible sweetness.

The slender kway teow rice noodles were generic, tender chewy, and picked up the flavours of the soup well.

I like the pork belly with skin, fat and lean meat which together was tender, porcine sweet and savoury from the sauce.

Intestines were well cleaned, tender, subtly crunchy and well infused with spice and savoury flavours.

The savoury sweet tongue was cut into thick, soft tender strips like French fries.

For tongue, I prefer it sliced thin. I also like them to feel creamy in the mouth on chewing.

Luong's pig skin was well cleaned and braised. Tender coil with a subtle spring (I much prefer this over those limp soft lifeless overdone skin.)

Chili is spicy mildly sour sweet savoury. This chili profile is quite common in Johor Bahru.

A simple, affordable traditional Johor Bahru breakfast (it is similar to kway chap in Singapore but we won't find kway teow kia like this anywhere else in the world except Johor).

You will enjoy Luong's rendition at Tong Seng kopitiam, if you like a more pronounced Chinese spice flavour with pronounced presence of sweetness. For me personally, I like to have more umami savouriness from soy sauce with just subtle porcine sweetness i.e. the old school JB 老新山 profile .