In Singapore, there is a zi char stall named Yi Jia Village Seafood Restaurant, and just across the custom in Johor Bahru, they have a similar restaurant called the Yi Jia Seafood restaurant 億家海鮮. Currently, they are 4 restaurants outlets in Johor Bahru. Each of them has their own unique decoration. We went to this new restaurant at Permas Jaya.
The restaurant is just a 20 mins drive from the custom, located in a quiet neighbourhood block. Plenty of parking lots available (which are shared among other restaurants along the stretch) and most importantly, did I forget to mention that parking is free?
The exterior of the restaurant looks new and good. When we were there at dinner time, there was quite a bit of crowd and we were a little worried that we have to wait for some time for our food to be served. We were lucky that the waitress saw us and quickly allocate a table to us in less than a minute.
People who came after we had to wait for a bit before they were seated.
Their "aquarium" displaying different types of live seafood.
The menu was presented to us almost immediately after we were seated.
This company has won many prestigious awards as indicated on the menu.
The Yi Jia Crispy Chicken 扁扁鸡 seemed to be a famous choice around other tables and so we decided to order a small portion to try it.
A must order dish if you are eating at a seafood is, of course, the crabs! They have 3 types of cooking using crab - Golden Egg Yolk, Honey Sauce or Otak. We went for Golden Egg Yolk as recommended by the waitress.
They have different operating hours at each outlet, be sure to check the timing if you are heading down.
First came was their signature dish, the crisp flattened chicken, 扁扁鸡. It is quite a unique dish as we did not see any similar dishes before in other restaurants.
The taste of the chicken was not bad in our opinion, however, the portion is considered small even for just 2 people. It cost 9 RM for this 8 small pieces of chicken.
Next is pork ribs 排骨王 (15 RM), this is one dish that does not appeal to me as the skin of the pork ribs presented were too soft. The meat was also too hard to my liking. It would be better if the chef can pre-fry the pork ribs to brown at the side, before mixing them together with the usual sweet and sour sauce. The overall taste was normal.
Next was potato leaves with sambal sauce (10 RM). I like how their sambal sauce, not as oily as others with mild sambal taste did not overpower the original taste of the potato leaves, preserving the crunchiness on the stem. One of the recommended dishes here.
Next came was the Fuyong fried egg 芙蓉蛋 (8 RM). Difficult not to love, it is one of the most popular dishes commonly found in a typical Chinese restaurant in both Malaysia and Singapore. The egg here was mixed with ingredients such as char siew, shrimps and plenty of spring onions, and pan-fried to golden brown, on the whole, ending with a crispy side around. Definitely, one of the best dishes to go with rice.
The finale, golden egg yolk crab came after a short wait. Priced at 1kg for 120 RM, the price was reasonable and worth the money. Most importantly, the meat was sweet, tender and very fresh!
Unlike the usual dry salted egg crab dishes, we were quite surprised to see the generous portion of salted egg yolk sauce given! We even scooped the sauce onto our plain rice! We like the sauce so much that we decided to order mantou 馒头 (fried buns) just to soak up all the sauces of the dish and ate it. Really a must order when you are here!
The price isn't the cheapest you could get in JB, but at least it's a decent eating environment with quality food. And they accept credit card payment as well if you have not enough cash on hand.
If you are a lover of seafood, you should try out Yi Jia seafood as the seafood they serve there is of a higher quality as compared to the usual zi char stalls in JB. Though they are not the cheapest you can find, it is still worth visiting if you are around the Permas Jaya area.
