Pantai Seafood Restaurant, Kg Kayu Ara

I cant recall the exact year I had my first meal at Pantai; my guess would be a few years back, for my birthday dinner.

Fast forward a few years later and I find myself back here again, this time with new found friends who were gracious to invite me along for dinner one weekend.

But Pantai has definitely expanded it's area over the years, it was much larger and caters for even more customers now.

We left the ordering to the man, the ladies continued with the bantering..

The prawns made its grand entrance first..

Cooked to perfection, the prawns were springy, sweet and so fresh. The accompanying addictive sauce complemented the prawns beautifully..

Stir fried fish slices with ginger..

An ubiquitous dish which Pantai did a slightly above average version of. The fish slices were thick and had nice flaky texture. Sauce was quite light.

The 2 style kailan

I think I first tried this style of kailan preparation in Pantai. Though a tad oily, this was still as tasty as I recalled.

The salt and pepper deep fried squids

The batter was a tad hard, which took more effort to chew. Not very impressive, this was an average dish.

The main reason we were in Pantai... we wanted crabs..

To our dismay, the local meat crabs were fully taken up (that was before 8pm!) and we were recommended to have the irish roe crabs.

Irish crabs at RM100 a kilo... well it better be good. We ordered 5 crabs to be cooked in 2 styles- with salted egg yolk and steamed.

The salted egg yolk version was served first..

The salted egg coating was pretty good, but when we tried the crab roe, we were disappointed. Although it had quite a substantial amount of roe; these irish crabs roe were more bland and not creamy :(. Nevermind the roe, I took a bite into the meat. Gosh, there were so many segmentation on the insides of the crabs that it took all of us a long time to finish each piece.

The steamed version..

We could really see the difference of these crabs to it's local counterparts. First thing we noticed was the weird 'curry puff' looking shell. And it's really hairy legs! And those darn hair were though bristle like ; which succeeded in hurting my fingers quite a number of time.

After all the digging and scraping for the flesh (which was not a lot); the crab meat was not worth the effort at all. It was just plain bland.

I cant recall the cost of the meal, but I sure did remember the crabs were RM320 (the rest of the dishes were ok priced). Felt cheated? Most definitely.

Pantai Seafood Restaurant is located at Lot 13575, Jalan Cempaka PJU 6A, Kg Sg Kayu Ara, Petaling Jaya. Tel No: 03 - 7725 5099/1099