Treat your mum

YOUR mother deserves nothing but the best for all the love, care and guidance she has showered upon you over the years.
So why not take her out for a really good meal to celebrate Mother's Day, at Esquire Kitchen.
Esquire Kitchen has a special Mother's Day promotion for tomorrow and Sunday, where diners who order a la carte dishes worth a minimum of RM50 in a single receipt will get a RM5 voucher.
The restaurant chain was founded in 1974, serving up 'home-style' cooking from Shanghai and Sichuan. Its first restaurant was opened in Jalan Bukit Bintang, Kuala Lumpur, and since then the company has grown by leaps and bounds.
Among its signature home-style dishes is tung po meat, an old traditional dish that was created during the Song Dynasty, and named after the scholar So Tong Po.
As the story goes, he was so engrossed in a game of chess that he overcooked his stewed pork.
In Esquire Kitchen's tung po meat recipe, the pork belly is braised in a special soy sauce until the meat is succulent and tender.
Other signature Sichuan dishes at Esquire Kitchen are sour and spicy soup, which has mushroom and minced pork, and boasts a fragrance of vinegar; paprika chicken, which has dried chilies, chicken cubes and cashew nuts stir fried in a special sauce; and eggplant Sichuan-style, featuring deep fried eggplant combined with a specially concocted sauce.
All these dishes have been served at Esquire Kitchen since the 1970s and are still popular.
Esquire Kitchen has also introduced some new dishes that customers will enjoy.
The paprika chicken in yam ring is one of Esquire Kitchen's best-selling dishes.
The yam ring (made from mashed yam) is deep-fried in hot oil to produce a texture that is crispy on the outside, but soft on the inside. The classic paprika chicken gives the ring an added depth of flavour.
Diners must also try the deep fried chicken in orange sauce, which is a chicken chop marinated and then deep fried and topped with a rich, citrusy aromatic orange sauce.
Another must-try is the golden sand fish, garoupa fish fillets coated with salted egg yolk batter and deep fried. The rich taste and aroma from the salted egg yolk on the fillets is tantalising.
Esquire Kitchen also serves a great egg taufu with vegetarian abalone.
The taste and 'meaty' texture of the vegetarian abalone is as good as the real thing, and together with mushrooms, egg taufu, and baby pak choy seasoned with abalone sauce, this is one dish the whole family will enjoy.
Another dish to enjoy is the stir fry mixed eryngii and shiitake mushrooms. Eryngii mushrooms are also known as king trumpet mushrooms, and have a meaty texture when cooked.
Esquire Kitchen cleverly combines shiitake mushrooms, a type that absorbs sauces, with eryngii mushrooms, a 'dry' texture mushroom, to produce a unique taste and texture.