Squeezy Bar

Squeezy Bar (Grote Combe)

This week the Snoodies cheated a little bit – we went back to our old favorite and stand-in Squeezy Bar.  Squeezy is a hot pot style chinese restaurant.  It doesn’t look like much from the outside, located directly across the street from De Hal, next to the new chinese market.  Squeezy bar is a very small restaurant run by a nice chinese lady who is always smiling, very friendly and an all around sweetheart.  The restaurant is small, with old christmas decorations strung across the ceiling and wall, and very hot once all the fires are going.  Every table has a burner (watch for the tubes of propane snaking down the side of the tables) set in the center of the table.  On the plus side, it’s clean, the ingredients are fresh and the utensils, plates, bowls and cups come in sterilized plastic wrapping.

Some of the Snoodies were recently introduced to hot pot by some good friends.  It’s a chinese version of Swiss fondue – only instead of cheese there is bouillon (which ofcourse is also an option for Swiss fondue).  There are several hot pot restaurants in Suriname, but so far Squeezy has the best atmosphere – in no small part due to the proprietor. 

When ordering, you can choose between plain bouillon or spicy bouillon or both – in which case the pot has a divider in the middle keeping the two bouillons separate.  The spicy bouillon does not taste spicy at the start, but boy oh boy at the end of the meal it is spicy.  The great thing of the hot pot is that the bouillon takes on the flavor of all the ingredients you cook in it.  So let’s walk through the perfect hot pot meal:

·       You’ve ordered both dip sauces – the soy based sauce which has ginger and green onions for flavoring.  The second sauce is a peanut paste with some sesame flavoring.  You mix these to together for a perfect dip sauce – the ratio is one tablespoon of paste to three table spoons of soy sauce.  Mix well and enjoy.

·      You order both spicy and plain bouillon, which arrives promptly with delicious seaweed, ginger, onions, etc. floating around in the bouillon.  Then comes the rest of the meal.

·      Veggies (personal favorite is the Chinese cabbage), mushrooms (the fresh are good, be careful with some of the Chinese mushrooms especially the fungus since it seems to give off the flavor of a gas leak when cooked), radish is also very tasty.  There is a wide variety of choices. 

·      Seafood – don’t order the octopus; once cooked it quickly becomes very chewy and not good.  The squid is awesome, the shrimp are good – but be pre-warned they come head and all – the best thing to do is to remove the head, unpeel and marinate it in the dip sauce for a few minutes.  Fishcakes are good – they soak up all the flavor very well. 

·      Protein – the mutton is really really good.  The meat is thinly sliced – about the thickness of deli meat and cooks very quickly.  The mutton tastes good and gives a nice flavor to the bouillon.  The beef is not very good – a little stringy.  The chicken is okay – nothing special.

·      Also order some stretched noodles – the egg noodles are more like Ramen Noodles (not a favorite).  The stretched noodles are hand stretched and very nice.  Apparently there is some symbolism behind the noodles – the long noodles indicate long life. 

·      Also, don’t forget to order some fried dumplings.  And there is a sashimi option; a plate of thinly sliced raw fish with soy sauce and a dab of wasabi.  The fish is frozen and comes to the table frozen.  You can always take the fish and hold it in the broth for a few seconds, but raw is better. 

All in all, a very satisfying, tasty, healthy and especially YUMMY meal – all thumbs up for Squeezy.  J

Score:

Ambiance – 3 (it’s a bit shabby looking and very hot once all the fires are going)

Food presentation – 5 (everything looks, tastes and is very fresh and brought out on individual plates)

Flavor – 5

Customer service – 4.5 (half a point off for the fact that once Squeeze gets busy sometimes items of orders can be forgotten).

Overall score: 4.75

Final words: A favorite place where everyone should go, at least once.