Portuguese Grilled Fish @ Petaling Street

It was the 2nd day through Hari Raya holidays, and Heart* proposed to cover a little distance for our dinner as traffic was at an ease (Part of our road trip adventure). So off we went into the heart of Kuala Lumpur city, specifically to Petaling Street.

After navigating around a little, and being unceremoniously thrown off course by idiotic police escorts and their equally idiotic 'VIP guests', we managed to park at place relatively close to our destination. Quite surprisingly the whole PS area was bustling with activity and congestion compared to the rest of KL.

The Portuguese charcoal grilled fish we had in mind is located at the PS intersection, just under Hong Leong bank actually. Place was crowded with eating patrons, and waiting ones. Kudos to Heart* for managing to snag a place not more than 10 minutes upon our arrival. He made the order and we waited for almost past 40 minutes for the first batch of our dishes to arrive.

Be warned though: All of the dishes are spicy, to the point of numbness.

White Pomfret. Garnished with long beans and ladies fingers. 

Stingray. Also garnished with the same batch of veges. I think this has got some dried shrimp thrown into the mix too. 

The stall operator forgotten about our lala (clamps) dish. This came in some time after we have finished our plates of steamed white rice.

Sugar cane drink. MYR 1.8. Kinda pricey in my opinion.

The total for all 3 dishes came up to about MYR 36, and the white pomfret alone cost MYR 18.

My opinion? I didn't like the dishes. All I gathered from the sambal paste is extreme spicyness, a tad salty and really oily. After a few mouthfuls your tongue literally gets numb and you will be sweating like crazy. I honestly don't get what the fuss is all about, that people would queue up for an hour for a mediocre dish. 

A word of advise is, know your limits when it comes to partaking of spicy food, I am fairly tolerant to spicy food, but this particularly one gave my tummy a terrible whirl few hours later. I was literally suffering through the motions for about 40 minutes when the pain set in, and I can tell you for certain, I wasn't the only one earlier this morning. 

2/5

Very tight walkways, full of foreigners, migrant workers, and imitation goods. Oh, there's even a brothel of sorts along the shoplots.

Would I make a 2nd trip? Maybe, if friends and family want to try the place out, as well as other food on offer (The popular ones are Hokkien noodles located opposite of the grilled fish place, lok-lok, claypot chicken rice, bah kua places, etc... that are all located outside of Petaling street, facing the roads) But no if on my own. Petaling Street is an interesting heritage place, but the impression it gave me yesterday was that it's full of weird people, and a lot of migrant workers. Almost seem like I am in a foreign country.

And a better place to have grilled fish is at Midvalley mall's Oasis food court (Old wing-centre court). I don't quite like it as the dish tends to be very oily, but taste wise definitely beats this in a heartbeat.