The lost cultural of Baba and Nyonya

First of all, let me introduce you the tradition of Baba and Nonya. Malaysia is a multi cultural country, we all know that. What we doesn't know is, back in the old days we have cross cultural marriage! And back then, you can have a Muslim wife and you continue to have your own religion, no problem at all. But not anymore, as the tradition has been discontinued. The one that is happening now, I will leave it for you to discover. What am I find more interesting is what happened back then. The mixed culture between Malay and Chinese, whilst the Chinese learned to cook Malay recipe with pork, and Malay learned to cook Chinese food without pork! And these cross marriage male are called Baba, and female are generally addressed as Nyonya.

Decoration of the restaurant is fairly simple and efficient. There are some old pallets being stacked up to block the toilet view, brilliant way to decorate. I did not ask who is Aunty Molly, but according to the way they serve my table, the lady at the back with red stripes, that is supposed to be Aunty Molly? And there's a younger lady that is serving another table, that believe to be junior Molly. Trust me boy, if the food is not what attracts you, atleast this girl is.

There's this huge wooden board in the restaurant, kids are having loads of fun drawing on it. I don't know about others, but I personally doesn't like the solvent smells from the ink pen, but hey, that's me. I'm happy because the kids are busy, so I can live with the solvent smell.

I forgot to snap a photo of the food menu, but trust me everything is properly spelled there and one wouldn't worry if got cheated. However, the beverage menu is rather "hostile". We locales know sweet and ice wouldn't solve the spicy problem. In a restaurant like this drinking cold and sweet juice, it will only cause us drink more juice than eating food.

So we ordered a passion fruit tea, and a sour plum mixed with lemon, super sour juices. This will stop us from drinking too much even if the food is extremely spicy!

First of all, this is one of the dish that when you visit a baba or nyonya restaurant, is a must have. If you do not order a Chicken/Pork Bontey, then your visit is incomplete! Pork and potatoes are braised until the flesh disintegrating, as if almost melt in my mouth. I like the fact that due to the meat being braised until it disintegrate, the meat juice goes into the broth and make the broth taste really good.

We also order a piece of ordinary fried egg since the kids may not like the food we ordered. The egg being fried according to the size of the frying pan and it's quite crunchy. It's lightly salted, and the kids love it much. Before I manage to take a photo, a chunk of the egg already being "removed".

And a bowl of claypot nenak curry fish will be good. It's a pot of curry broth that boiled together with coconut extract and pineapple. I bet you can't imagine how that taste like, I'm just going to tell you it's thick, lightly fruity, spicy as usual, and the coconut fragrant makes it very good combination with white rice. Since we have the braised potato pork, I'm just regretting for not having enough white rice!

I'm not a regular sambal guy. We refer chilly paste as Sambal here. This is sambal prawn with petai. I don't know what Petai is, in English. The smells of this bean is very strong, probably above onion/garlic/asparagus! Having the praw fried with Petai, onions in Chilly paste, this dish can also makes you eat several bowl of white rice. LazyMom doesn't really like it since it's overly spicy, saying the hotness has killed the significant of the dish.

The best part of this is, the restaurant located in a residental area. It's totally off from tourist spot, and anyone around these area would probably know Aunty Molly for quite sometime. Is a friendly shop, smells really amazing and taste of mind blowing mixed cultural meal!

Last but not lease, a bowl of cendol shaved ice as closing. We know Malaysian likes cendol,, but the ones in Melaka makes a lot of difference because the way they cook the coconut caramel makes the whole dessert worthwhile. You can take the same thing in Penang as Penang also have Baba and Nyonya, but the one in Penang uses palm fruit caramel instead of coconut caramel. So, the taste is totally different. And the bill came to RM84. Not too cheap though, but imagine the bowl of fish already caused us RM24. They charged according to market price, so if you know that day fish is expansive, then order a smaller piece of not ordering the fish dish will makes lot of sense to avoid paying too much.

Restaurant Information

Aunty Molly Nyonya Food

42A, Jalan MP2, TMN MERDEKA PERMAI, 75350 Melaka, Malaysia