food

Claypot prawn rice and other one-pot wonders at Restoran Busy Corner

BY JAMES TAN
October 13, 2015

Fresh, crunchy onions scattered on top of a bed of white rice, deliciously savoury sauce and fresh prawns makes a most satisfying one-pot meal. – Pic by James Tan, October 13, 2015.If you’ve only ever eaten the standard claypot chicken rice, it’s time you tried some of the other sumptuous goodness an earthen pot can make.

I've never been a fan of one-pot wonder meals where everything is thrown into a pot and left to cook until done and ready to serve. I find it to be a lesser art if at all. I mean, how difficult can it be to do practically nothing but cut ingredients and fire up a pot? Yes, I have a lot of these silly prejudices, just waiting to be overturned.

I'm surrounded by people who love claypot chicken rice, so you can imagine how difficult my life can get at times. I was practically dragged kicking and screaming into Restoran Busy Corner, a claypot rice specialist tucked in a, well, busy corner of Damansara Jaya.

That was years ago, and I have had to swallow my pride and admit that I have been back time and again ever since.

Restoran Busy Corner is possibly the best place for claypot chicken rice. This place gets a lot of extra points for innovating an otherwise run-of-the-mill fare.

Aside from the typical claypot chicken rice, their menu features a great choice of flavours such as black pepper chicken rice, red bean sauce chicken rice, Thai chicken rice, yam chicken rice, black pepper steak rice and prawn rice.

On top of this, you also get a few choices of soup and veggies. To me, one of the best things here is surely the claypot prawn rice.

Make no mistake, this is a "yat wok sok" dish, but its simple combination of ingredients is its triumph. A single order comes with 7 large and fresh prawns, shelled for your eating convenience. The naked prawns also soak up the flavourful sauce which you might otherwise lose along with the shells when you peel them.

The sauce, I suspect, is made of "har cheong" which is fermented shrimp paste. This tasty concoction gets along swimmingly with the prawns. The dish is topped with raw sliced onions which lend the meal a nice sweet crunch that makes it all good.

All of this is cooked in an earthen pot over a charcoal stove, which gives it another great characteristic – the burnt rice crust at the bottom of the pot which I never fail to scrape up. Adds a little crisp to every bite!

This is what you get after mixing the whole claypot of goodness together. – Pic by James Tan, October 13, 2015.So how does Restoran Busy Corner's claypot prawn rice fare? Here's an inkling.

In the many years I've eaten here, I've really only sampled the regular claypot chicken rice and the black pepper variant, and of course the prawn. Since then, I've never been able to get past it, so yes, I order the prawn every single time I'm  here. It's that good. – October 13, 2015.

Restoran Busy Corner | Add: 83, Jalan 22/11, Damansara Jaya, 47400 Petaling Jaya | Tel: 603-7725 3092 | Opening hours: 11am – 2.30pm, 5pm - 9.30pm daily except Thursdays | GPS coordinates: 3.130532, 101.621143 | Non-Halal

* All of The Malaysian Insider food reviews are incognito and reflect the personal opinions of our merry band of foodies. If you know of any restaurant serving awesome grub, share it with the rest of the world and drop us a line with details at [email protected].