Coffee Talk Edition #001

After careful considerations, I've came up with the conclusion to write a coffee talk column which features my personal opinion based on my daily life happenings. Basically, this will be the part whereby I ramble on many things from work life to personal hobby or about friends to family related happenings. For my fellow readers, please do let me know if there's by any chance this space can be further improve in the near future. Your critics will be welcomed openly.

The recent tragedies that hit the island has become the talk of the town as of late. The death of several people caused by the collapse of the second bridge construction and also from the freak storm that hit the city was rather unfortunate. I had a few outstation friends asking me if I felt the impact from the two tragedies and my answer to them is a simple YES! I travel daily through the second bridge construction area and I also happen to travel past the area on that same fateful day itself. From what I can recall for that day, the traffic was rather bad and there's plenty of heavy vehicles like busses and lorries passes through the unsafe work zone of the bridge. With such heavy vehicles passing daily, such incidents are bound to happen someday and eventually it happened! I only knew about the bridge collapse in the late night when I read through message postings on Facebook.

For the freak storm, I was travelling home after work as I've decided to leave work much earlier than usual on that day. As I'm passing through the town area, I was hesitating to either take Macalister Road or Burma Road to get to where I need as heavy rain and wind picks momentum. In the end, I chose to use Burma Road instead. However it's not incident free. Rolling helmets, crashing tree branches, shop billboards floats right in front of your vehicle and I can even see some people holding hard onto the steel beams like that was used for their make-shift durian stall tent. The aftermath was really bad as plenty of age old trees being up-rooted and of course the news of the heavy concrete cum antenna from the UMNO building collapses. Gut wrenching to even hear that someone died under that collapsed structure.

People told me that it has been two consecutive weeks of such ugly incident and the question is, will there be a third one for this coming week? Let's hope not and will be definitely hoping that better days are ahead for every Penangites. However, it's quite inevitable that there's another problem brewing off shore and it will probably be engulfing the island soon enough. That'll be the ever dreaded haze and I'm having my fingers crossed that the haze will stay away from the island for as long as possible.

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J.S. Burgers Cafe

J.S.バーガーカフェ J.S. Burgers Cafe
Location: Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo
Date of Visit: 9th March 2011

>> I was browsing through the photos that I took when I was in Japan back in 2011 with my family when I stumble upon these set of pictures of a burger place in Tokyo. I believe that this experience is worth sharing it with my fellow readers.

When you are in Tokyo and you find yourself tasting too much of sushi, tempura, sashimi or ramen, chances are you'll be reeling from taking another japanese meal. Make a stop at J.S. Burgers Cafe for a quick fix and you will not regret this. You'll need to walk up a flight of stairs to 3rd floor in order to reach this unique cafe. There are clear signboards around so it's not that easy to miss out on this place.

The cafe is very clean, well organized and brightly lit. The menu offers a very straight forward hearty American burger meal. Burgers! Fries! Shakes! It's a heaven and a break from the usual Japanese meal. From my personal opinion, I feel that the price that you have to pay for this meal rather reasonable from this part of the town. The cheapest burger will only costs you ¥700 and of course I won't settle for the cheapest one while I'm here.

From I can recall, we ordered a Cheese Dog that costs ¥850, a Fried Chicken Burger that costs ¥900 and a Bacon Egg Burger that costs ¥ 1080. And to top it off, an order of a large cup of Melon Soda that costs ¥400, I define the overall meal experience here as priceless! Crispy and crunchy fries, the right amount of sauces where it is needed to be, the freshness of the salads that's being provided in the burgers.

Besides the burger experience, here's the funny side of what my family found out from this cafe. It's the Japanese technology when they visited the toilet. Toilet light turns on automatically when the door is opened and the toilet seat too will be brought down. Mom was amazed with the technological advancement from the cafe's toilet that she ran back and told us the toilet experience that she has had.

That took our curiosity to a whole new level and one by one, we made a visit to the toilet. The cafe has a patio that you may enjoy your meal overlooking the skyscrapers around the Shinjuku area. The cool & crisp winter weather added with the juicy hotness from those burgers, it's just beyond description! Definitely a big YES for me if I were to ever return to Tokyo. For this burgers, I'll be begging to make time for it.

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Kappa Sushi

かっぱ寿司 Kappa Sushi
Location: Ueno, Taito-ku, Tokyo
Date of Visit: 1st May 2010

>> Step into the world where walking down narrow alleys in Tokyo city will bring you to the most authentic sushi restaurants that you can't imagine finding in such places.There are plenty of sushi restaurants all over Tokyo but I personally prefer this place than the rest.

How do you get there? Take the JR Yamanote train to Okachimachi station and use the North Gate exit. Look for the Jeans Mate store and walk into that little alley and you'll find Kappa Sushi. You may find a little queue lining up outside if you arrive later than 7pm. On the day of our first visit, we decided to go there for lunch around 1pm. There's no queue. We got in and took our seats in front of the counter. The only place to sit is in front of the counter!

The restaurant patrons are mainly locals and there are some Japanese from other parts of the country that came to this restaurant for a meal. Smoking is strictly not allowed in the restaurant which is a good thing as Japan is considered a smoking country. The place is not brightly lit like many modern Japanese sushi restaurants out there. The place looks rather shabby and old but that's not what patrons come here for.

Not for the environment but for that one thing... the freshness of the food that's being prepared! There are a total of 2 counters in the restaurant and each counter are manned by an Itamae. Itamae is the sushi chef that stands in front of the counter ready to take your orders. Our Itamae was an elderly gentleman who stood there smiling at us while we're trying to make our order. Then it struck us!

We noticed that the staff working in the restaurant does not speak a word English. So what do we do? We use fingers to point to what we wanted and whatever broken form of Japanese that we can mutter out of our mouths. At one point the Itamae was kind enough to tell us the fish names in Japanese, that we're eating. I manage to take a look at the Itamae's knife skill and his skill in slicing the fishes is superbly skillful.

We had plenty of nigiri sushi and also sashimi while we're at it. Mom's personal favourite consists of Sake (salmon) sashimi while Dad's personal favourite is the Toro (fatty tuna belly) sashimi. On the contrary, myself prefers nigiri sushi. We ordered Sake (salmon), Tamago (egg omelette), Uni (sea urchin roe), Maguro (tuna), Unagi (fresh water eel), Ikura (salmon roe) and my very personal favourite Toro (fatty tuna belly) nigiri.

Speaking of fatty tuna belly, it's a very expensive piece of fish that you can only eat it off at a cheaper price in Japan. This fish can easily costs you RM300 for 3 slices in Malaysia while it only costs ¥350 for 4 slices. Back home, we gave no honour to these fish slices as most of us would just lather the slice with soy and quickly chew it off because of the bad fish taste especially from fishes that they are not familiar with.

There are also etiquette on how to eat sushi too. You can pick up the sushi with chopsticks or with your fingers. You are only to lightly dip the fish, not the rice, into the soy. In Malaysia, people would dump wasabi into the soy sauce and then dunk the rice into the soy. Wasabi should be put directly onto the sushi, not the soy. The overall experience in a sushi restaurant in Japan is very surreal and I definitely wanted more of this the next time I visit.

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Johor Premium Outlets

Johor Premium Outlets
Location: Indahpura, Kulaijaya, Johor
Date of Visit: 2nd June 2013

>> Located at the intersection of the North-South Expressway and the Second Link Expressway, this place is officially opened on 11th December 2011. The center is highly accessible to all traffic going to and from Johor and Singapore.

This place comprises a collection of 80 designer and name brand outlet stores. One may ask what's the difference between outlets and normal retails? Keen shoppers can get factory-direct savings of 25% to 65% by shopping in the outlet stores. Would the designs be as new as the ones we saw in the normal retails? Off season goods are normally being channeled to the outlet stores whereas normal retails normally offers newer and in-season goods.

You may get goods that you see in retails the previous year here however, it will still be depending on the buyers luck if the fitable sizes are still be available. The place is swarmed by Singaporeans over the weekends, hence you may also have to fend yourself off from the hordes of money flingers that came here to buy branded goods. It's a familiar sight as the one in Hong Kong whereby mainlanders are doing the same to the locals.

With Singapore's currency so much superior than the puny Malaysian Ringgit, I must admit that by looking at how they spend is extremely crazy and sometimes brainless. This also leads to another problem. When you walk into a branded store such as Burberry for example, the sales personnel will eye you from top to bottom before deciding to serve you or not. Yep! They will just stand there and look at you for a second or two.

If you are wearing cheap clothes and slippers on the day you go visiting, you'll get the same treatment as I've personally encountered. Zero attention. On the opposite side, if you are dressed by branded goods from head to toe, you'll be immediately attended to. The double standard is extremely obvious that left me fuming after visiting such stores. Another issue that's being observed... the rich queuing up to get designer bags.

It's quite ironic to see them being so desperate and raring to go into the store by queuing up in the searing heat for almost an hour. If anyone asks me to queue, I'd seriously tell them to go f**k themselves. I'd rather come back the next time when the crowds are less like the weekdays. The visiting experience at the outlet made me think if outlet shoppers would kill themselves just for the sake of a good bargain over branded goods. Chances are, they might!

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