JB Eat: Roast & Coffee (三姐妹) Retro Garden 1968's @ Tan Hiok Nee

Rick
Oct 20
3 min read

Restoran Roast & Coffee (三姐妹), or "R&C" for short, is one of the many eateries along Tan Hiok Nee Heritage Walk, and it serves traditional coffees and Nanyang cuisines. Apart from Hainanese breakfast, R&C also serves popular Malaysian delicacies like laksa, nasi lemak, fried rice, mee rebus, etc, and some popular Singapore dishes too.

R&C has several branches across Johor Bahru and the outlet at Tan Hiok Nee Heritage Walk is the flagship. Expect a queue on weekends and public holidays.

Roast & Coffee's signature Hainanese breakfast (海南三宝) consists of traditional kopi-O, double butter & kaya toast with two soft-boiled kampung eggs. The items are ordered separately and allow mix-and-match to create the desired breakfast set. In addition to traditional breakfast and coffees, R&C also have a wide range of traditional food typical of a Nanyang kopitiam. For first-timers to the kopitiam, the "Top Ten" menu (十大精选美食) highlights ten recommended dishes to try — surprisingly, it includes Singapore Hokkien Prawn Mee (星洲福建炒虾面).

Getting a set of Double Butter & Kaya Toasts (双牛油咖椰), 2 x soft-boiled Kampung Eggs (半熟甘榜蛋) and a cup of hot Coconut Hor Kar Sai (海南椰香虎咬狮) is how I "created" my first traditional breakfast set at R&C.

Hor kar sai (虎咬狮) is a Taiping-specialty coffee, and in R&C, it is added with coconut cream to add coconut flavour to the no-milk Milo-kopi beverage. The Double Butter & Kaya Toasts has twice as much slices of butter which make the traditional toasts sinfully buttery and savoury. And the kampung eggs are well-boiled to a perfect state.

Roast & Coffee (三姐妹): Traditional breakfast set

Top-Left: Another coffee to try is Gu You Kopi-O (古油咖啡乌), which is traditional kopi-O added with butter that melts in the hot black coffee to give it a smooth texture and buttery aroma. Gu You Kopi (古油咖啡), with milk, is also available.

Top-Right: If the Double Butter & Kaya toast is not enough to satisfy the palate, try their signature Tiga Rasa Toasts (三姐妹), or three-flavour toasts. In addition to two slices of butter, peanut butter is spread on one side with kaya on the other side, giving the toasts an additional flavour.

Bottom: The Salted Egg French Toast (咸蛋法兰西多士) looks super tempting on the menu and is hard not to go for it — anything with salted egg is tasty. The salted-egg filling, with basil leaves, chopped chillies, etc, is sandwiched between two pieces of bread, dipped with beaten raw egg and fried. It is then served with a slice of butter on top that melted on the hot toast. The French toasts has buttery flavour and savoury salted egg flavours with some spiciness. It is really yummy! Other than salted egg, they also have French toasts with peanut, honey and kaya.

Roast & Coffee (三姐妹): More breakfast with toasts

The handmade Zui Kueh (手工水粿), or chwee kueh, topped with dried pickled white radish (菜脯) and white sesame seeds, is something special and a must-try. The uniqueness of this chwee kueh is the addition of sweet dark sauce that makes it very different from Singapore. It is great for light breakfast too.

The Golden Duck Char Kuey Teow (黄金鸭蛋炒粿条) uses yellow noodle with kway teow (flat noodle) to stir-fry with two big prawns, fishcakes, cockles, duck egg, beansprouts, spring onions and accompanied by a lime and sour-sweet-spicy chilli paste. The dish has a mellow wok aroma with nice flavours and non-oily. It is tasty and quite a hearty dish.

R&C's 3 Layer Kopi (三色咖啡) is an iced coffee comprising of a top layer of strong black coffee, middle layer of evaporated milk and a bottom layer of palm sugar. The coffee is sweetened with palm sugar flavour but not overly sweet.