Saturday, November 14, 2009

on the plate - Ninja Joe @ Tropicana City Mall

Anything to do with pork is relatively scarce over here in this country. For fans of "the other white meat", it can be hard to find pork outside of Chinese food, so having burgers with REAL bacon (not the beef bacon stuff) or decent pork chops or baby back ribs (Tony Roma's, yes, I'm giving you the evil eye for forsaking your signature dish here) is a rarity, comparatively.

Surprisingly, pork makes pretty good decent burger meat, so some places do serve a good pork burger (Sid's Pub, Ribs@Oasis) but pork burgers are also quite costly as pork is pretty much the most expensive locally produced meat here (let's not count Australian beef, but face it, how many burger places actually use that over Indian or local beef?).

Enter Ninja Joe, another unique joint to Tropicana City Mall (is it just me or are there so many good places that are only in this mall?). The menu is simple. Pork burgers. That's about the extent of it. Seriously.

The burgers are pretty small, about the size of a colonel burger at KFC (just for reference). The pork patty is tasty and has onions in it as well, and garnished simply with some lettuce and a slice of tomato. You get a choice of flavors - original, black pepper, teriyaki, oriental, sweet & sour or spicy. One burger costs RM5.95, two will set you back RM9.95, three costs RM12.95, and well, you get the point. The more burgers you order in one order, the cheaper each burger gets. The idea here since the burgers are small is that you can order more than one, and try different flavors.

In addition to that, you can also make it a combo meal by adding RM3 for a drink and fries. You get to choose between cold green tea or lemonade, and you get crinkle cut fries. They also sell shuriken, which are nuggets made of mashed potato and pork (I tried that, and it was more potato than pork), green salad is on the menu but they haven't started selling that yet.

I haven't had the opportunity to take pictures yet. Will add them sometime! Ninja Joe is located on the LG floor of Tropicana City Mall, if you're facing Carrefour, it will be towards the right, just keep heading down that way and you'll see it around the corner.

Food: 6.8/10
Drink: 6.0/10
Service: 7.0/10