Let’s be real here. When you go to Sandakan, you don’t go for the food. The food is really a side benefit to the local adventures. Our local adventure was seeing orangutans. But of course, you can’t simply spend all day watching the world’s largest arboreal primates without eating some food, so we went next door to the Banana Cafe in the Sepilok Jungle Resort.
The menu looked pretty good and the view of the grounds was even better. We spotted some cool birds and even a monitor lizard, but also I spotted the Singapore-Style Noodles. These noodles started out as vermicelli, but along the way gathered curry powder, eggs and some chicken. They were stir-fried up and turned out really tasty. Interestingly, it turns out that these noodles actually don’t have any sort of origin in Singapore and were allegedly created in Hong Kong. Perhaps they are analogous to the French Dip in the US.
Regardless, there is no doubt that I would visit the Banana Cafe and eat these noodles again – even if I wasn’t just looking for something to get me through a day of looking at orangutans. Sometimes “touristy” food can be a bad thing, but fortunately that wasn’t the case at Banana Cafe.
