Great Chinese Food at Noble House, Imbi

The Oriental Group of Restaurants is only slightly over 10 years old, but it's already established itself as one of the top Chinese restaurant chains in KL, with ten different outlets spread out around the city. Their Executive Chef, Chef Justin Hor, even won Hospitality Asia Platinum's 2010-2012 Best Chinese Cuisine Chef for Noble House Restaurant, Kuala Lumpur, where we went to celebrate my Uncle's 50th birthday :)


We started off with a couple of servings of Roast Pork (not part of the 8-course dinner for the night) - this is actually pretty good, especially if you like your siew yuk with some "substance." The meat's not tough by any standards; it's just not as flaky / break-apart-in-the-mouth as some other siew yuk's in town.


Peking Duck is the opener course of the night and is also pretty good! Personally I don't like it when the waitresses serve up the skin pre-sauced and pre-wrapped; I prefer to DIY it totally to control the amount of sauce, skin, pancake, scallion and cucumber ratio. As is normal with Peking Duck, the meat is cooked and served at a later course.


Braised Sharks Fin Soup with Crab Meat & Crab Roe is also pretty nice, managing to avoid excessive starch in the broth. Although to be honest, I really don't get why some people like sharks fin so much - it doesn't contribute any flavor to the soup at all.

Incidentally, to those shark lovers among you reading this, I'd just like to give you an "other side of the coin" point of view: "... research showing 80% of the 73 million sharks killed each year are in fact caught accidentally." I'm not supporting the killing of sharks, just merely giving some alternative viewpoints that the "live finning" that people like to rave about may not necessarily be as widespread as they think.


Moving on to yet another Chinese food that I don't understand - Abalone. Specifically, the Steamed Abalone with Prawn Paste and Treasure Chest Beancurd. The dish is overall quite delicious, but I've never been a huge abalone fan.


The Steamed Deep-Sea Garoupa with Fresh Beancurd Skin & Black Fungus is a little lacking in presentation but more than makes up for it with a nice texture and bite to the fish meat, and a well balanced soy-sauce-based gravy.


The black sheep of the night was the Roasted Crispy Shatin Chicken & Thousand Layer Pork Ear Thai Style. I wasn't a big fan of the gaminess of the pigeon, nor the pig ears.


The duck meat from the Peking Duck makes its' re-appearance in the carb-dish: Fried Rice with Duck Meat & Raw Egg. Rice was fried pretty well, nice and fragrant.


For desserts we have a cold bowl of Chilled Snow Pear with Sea-Coconut served with Steamed Pumpkin Bun - fairly decent desserts but not really particularly memorable.

We thought that the food in Noble House was very solid, although we wouldn't go as far to agree with Hospitality Asia Platinum's "Best Restaurant" assertion. The restaurant is also decorated pretty nicely, staff were well trained, friendly and attentive, and parking was also quick and easy thanks to a well oiled valet system. Highly recommended. Non halal.