Sanbanto Cafe has an attractive name board and their appearance of the shop is what attracted me. Fresh premium pork will be selling there. Ordered pesto spaghetti, as you know pesto is a crushed of olive oil, garlic, basil, pine nuts ,cheese etc So I do always curious of their taste because I love all of their ingredients. Taste wise this is cheezy and garlic smell. It contained roasted pork on top, crispy and salty. Portion is average. Overall ok.
Pork nachos. As an appetizer and so happened that I was craving for nachos, I was so glad that Sanbanto has pork nachos in its menu. I ordered without any hesitation. The nachos was topped with minced pork and melted cheese. The toppings were awesome and the melted cheese made it so sticky. The chili dipping sauce was slightly sour. The nachos was however seemed not cook, it has funny texture.
Homemade Pesto. Since the green color spaghetti caught our eyes, we ordered this pesto spaghetti. It was topped with bacon slices and some cheese. The spaghetti was very rich with pesto sauce, filled with the flavours of garlic and basil leaves. The spaghetti however was not too soft, made the chewing a bit difficult. The bacon was very salty and the amount was not much.
Crispy pork salad. Well, not many restaurant offers pork salad and Sanbanto is one of them. The salad contained onions, lettuce, longan and deep fried pork slices. This is the first restaurant that I come across that incorporate longan in the salad. The longan was sweet and juicy. The pork slices were very crispy and big pieces, slightly salty. The lettuce was very fresh.
Could this be SS2's answer to El Cerdo? Sanbanto uses organic pork from their own farm in Johor to whip up simple but satisfyingly tasty dishes.
The pork liver pate is rave-worthy if you can tolerate the strong flavour of offal. Spread this soft, smooth blend on the bread, then mix in the salad for a luxuriously creamy sandwich.
The piece de resistance is the BBQ pork rib. Every table seemed to order it. Meaty, succulent and sweet, it would be worth returning for this alone.
The two of us were so impressed by the pork rib, we decided to order the pastas too. We enjoyed the comfort foodish spaghetti with thin-sliced pork belly and peas, though the pastas are slightly less than al dente here.
Pork bolognaise pappardelle. Would have been more fulfilling with extra minced pork. But still scrumptious, with bits of pork lard adding some crunch.
The spaghetti with short ribs was oily but sinfully pleasurable. We considered shocking the restaurant staff by asking for the pork belly salad and bacon burger as well, but realized that we had hit our cholesterol quota for the week.
Sanbanto is famous for its pork dishes. No exclusion to their version of bolognese that was made of pork. The spaghetti was topped with some cheese. The sprinkles of cheese was just a little, not enough to make the whole dish cheesy and jelak. The minced meat bolognese was superb! Some might feel that it was too salty, but to me, it was all good. The minced meat was soft. It has pork lards in it too, that gave a crispy texture while eating it. Thumbs up for this dish! Slurp!
From the picture you can see one nice and plump pork rib, together with another helping of their amazing mash potato, some veggies, and some sauce on the side. As I'm sure you've noticed already, the sauce is drawn in the shape of a pig! I don't think they will bother drawing one every time someone orders to pork rib - the chef probably does it when he has a bit more free time, like in the case of that night when we were there. Doing a quick comparison with the picture provided on their website, even the sample pic there doesn't have the sauce drawn in a little piggy shape. So I guess we were quite fortunate. Certainly it earned 10/10 for presentation. =P
Next up we have the spaghetti carbonara. There are not that many choices of pasta at SanBanTo, but I personally love anything to do with creamy sauce or cheese, so carbonara suits me just fine. The really unique thing about this particular carbonara that got us hooked is the distinct porky flavour of the cream sauce. Whilst normal carbonaras will have more cheese and cream taste, this one actually has the flavour of pork and bacon cooked into the sauce itself, giving it a much more distinct taste. It definitely lives up to the reputation of SanBanTo, which is meant to be a true pork-lover's dream!
For the average diner, it's quite rare to order SEPARATE servings of mash potato because there will usually be a little bit of mash or fries on the side of main courses. It's not to say that SanBanTo's mains don't have sides. It's because their mash is SO GOOD, that the first time we ever sunk our teeth into their mash potato, we just knew we had to have more of it. And since then we have always ordered an extra bowl of mash potato only. It only happens at SanBanTo. Trust me when I say it is THAT good.
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