Sabah Eat: Little Sulap Cafe Sabahan Food & Sago Worms @ Kota Kinabalu

Rick
Oct 26
3 min read

Little Sulap Cafe is located to the rear of The Atkinson Place in Australia Place, Kota Kinabalu. The name "Sulap" means "hut" or "shelter" in the Dusun language. It is a small restaurant but a great place to go for authentic Sabah specialties, including local Sabahan comfort food, lihing (rice wine), butod (sago worm), etc.

The signature dishes of Little Sulap Cafe are "Original Sabahan" and "Ambuyat Set" with the same set of ingredients but one is with rice and the latter is with ambuyat. Other than Sabah eats, there are toasts, steamed / roasted chicken with noodle / rice, western dishes, light snacks, satays, desserts, etc. There are also local rice wine among a list of alcoholic beverages to get "woozy".

The Ambuyat Set is served with two deep-fried fishes, half a salted egg, cuts of pumpkin, cucumber slices and 4 vegetable dishes with different flavours of sweet, savoury, sour and spicy. The dish is accompanied by a bowl of sour soup and ambuyat, which serves as the staple to eat with the ingredients instead of rice.

Ambuyat is a starchy substance extracted from the trunk of sago palm. It is the national dish of Brunei and also a local specialty dish of Sarawak and Sabah. The Ambuyat Set is a great dish to experience how Sabahan locals eat.

The ambuyat is eaten with the use of chandas — looks like chopsticks but with one end taped — to roll up the starchy ambuyat. It took me nearly an hour to finish the meal — other diners used forks and spoons for their ambuyat instead.

The Chicken Delight is served with two pieces of deep-fried crispy chicken, beras bukit (rice from the hill), a piece of cracker, sambal chilli and a separate bowl of sour soup. The Sabah rice (beras bukit) is a mixture of rice grains with purple pericarp and milled endosperms with lighter purplish colour. It is basically a fried chicken rice set with its unique flavours.

Little Sulap's butod, or sago worms, are kept alive in a box with wood shavings. I have two fried and one live sago worms to challenge myself. The worms are accompanied by fresh cucumber, romaine lettuce and mandarin orange with a sweeter note than limey acidity.

Little Sulap Cafe: Live and fried butods / sago worms

It took me few seconds to down the two fried ones but more than 10 minutes to get the live one into my mouth. It has jaws that can still bite and I have trouble trying to hold it by its small head using my thick fingers. I use two prongs of a fork to hold the head of the wiggly worm before bitting off its body and chew. The skin is slight chewy and crunchy with no weird taste — quite tasteless actually and that is the original taste.

I used to watch videos where some people would feed the worms with sago jellies before eating them so the worms would taste like mild-sweet sago.

Little Sulap Cafe: Live butod / sago worm

If the sago worms are sold out, it will take several days or weeks for the "worm catchers" to find and supply the cafe with wriggling fat worms. So, when the worms are available, don't procrastinate!

The 800ml tumpung is rather big in size. The content is the raw glutinous rice residue after fermentation of lihing (rice wine). It is then added with water before serving. Unlike most Chinese fermented glutinous rice (糯米酿) sold in Singapore supermarkets that are often sweetened and of ultra-low alcohol content, tumpung is lesser in sweetness and stronger in alcohol content. It has quite a large amount of rice. Best to share instead of downing it solo.