JB Eat: Pin Wan Wan (拼碗碗) Chinese-Style Mini Bowl @ KSL City Mall
- Rick
- Sep 16
- 3 min read
Pin Wan Wan (拼碗碗) is a fast food-style restaurant serving Chinese delicacies in "mini bowls" — very similar to dining at cooked food stalls but its dishes are served in smaller bowls for single diner or small group of people / family. Pin Wan Wan setup its first outlet in Mount Austin (2023) and the second outlet in the basement of KSL City Mall (2024), hidden in a corner to the left of (when facing) Lotus's supermarket.
Pin Wan Wan's long list of Chinese dishes combines the best of Sichuan, Hunan and Cantonese cuisine, some with local twists. Several of their signature dishes (招牌小碗菜) are displayed on signboards for easy reference.
There is no menu — just take a tray, go down the long food counter and pick up any number of desired dishes (name and price of each dish are displayed) with white rice (optional) and pay at the counter. There are cook-to-order dishes as well, just take an "order" card, pay at the counter with any other items and wait at the table (during off-peak hours) for the freshly cooked dish(es) to be served.
The cook-to-order Signature Spicy Chicken (招牌辣子鸡) is a popular Sichuan-style mala dish where small cuts of chicken are coated in batter and deep-fried with dry chillies, peppercorn, spring onions and white sesame seeds. The freshly-cooked meat is crispy and tasty with just-nice spiciness and numbing effect on the tongue. It is delicious indeed and the portion is large enough for 2 pax.
The Sichuan Fish-Flavoured Sauce Eggplant (鱼香茄子) is another signature dish. There is no fish in the dish, of course, and the eggplant is fried with condiments that are used to prepare fish by Sichuan locals. The strips of eggplant are nicely-cooked, not soggy and coated with nice flavours and mild spiciness of the sauce.
The white rice uses fat, short-grain pearl rice (珍珠米) with some stickiness and can be eaten with chopsticks. Free soup, flavoured with white cabbage and other ingredients, is available at the self-service counter.
The Chinese-style Braised Beef Potato (土豆焖牛肉) is a non-spicy dish with chunky beef and large cuts of potato. It has nice savoury flavour, not salty, and can be quite hearty — best to pair with a light veggie dish for solo diner. The sauce goes very well with rice.
The Sichuan Mapo Tofu (麻婆豆腐) may seem very spicy from its reddish colour but the spiciness is rather tamed with savoury flavours. The tasty soft tofu and minced pork are great accompaniments for rice too — I would have gotten a second serving of rice if I had paired it with another light dish.
Pin Wan Wan's Chinese dishes are really legit and tasty without being overly spicy or salty. The portion of the dishes in "mini" bowls can be quite large — recommend just 2 dishes for single diner.
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Address:
KSL City Mall, LG67-68
33, Jalan Seladang, Taman Abad, 80250 Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia
Opening Hours:
10am to 10pm | Daily
How to Get There:
From JB Sentral, take myBAS F100 to KSL City Mall. Read JB Bus Guide: Getting to KSL City Mall in Johor Bahru.
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