Update 19-Jul-2008: Please note that Coco Chilli had now closed. In it’s place now is Pho 99. Click here to read the blog post for Pho 99.

Alexandra Road has a large concentration of restaurants in Richmond. That 1/2 mile stretch from Garden City and the No 4 Road is lined with restaurants. If there is one place we lunch out a lot on weekends, it is here. We go to Kam Do and Silver Tower quite a bit.

Despite all the visits, we had never stepped into Coco Chilli before. We knew it was there, who would not have noticed the bright yellow facade. It does looked a bit teenager’ish to us and without taking a second glance we thought that it is a bubble tea house or something like that. We were wrong.

I can’t really figure out what type of a restaurant Coco Chilli is. They have quite a bit of spicy and curry dishes. On one hand, I would say that they are a South East Asian restaurant but then it’s something about it that says that it is a cafe style restaurant.

Whatever it is, they have a very extensive menu. What we like best is that there are lots of pictures on them. Maybe it was bad timing but when we placed our order, all our top choices were not available. They apologized and told us that it is either that the ingredients had not arrived (oysters) or they had ran out of ingredients.

Surprisingly the restaurant is absolutely packed with people. This place must be popular. Despite their popularity, I must add that the bowl I was given had morsels of dried up food still sticking on it. Yucks!

For drinks we ordered their Coconut Milk with Jelly. It was super rich but refreshing and extremely yummy. We love it but at the same time know that coconut milk is not exactly very healthy.

It was still mummy’s choices that weekend’s eating out. So, mummy kiboshed any desire for fried rice for Arkensen and Nanzaro. We knew they wanted anything with lots of carbo in it. So, we introduced to them the Belacan Vermicelli. Oh, the boys sulked alright but when they took the first bite, they were sold. (See that, boys? Mummy sure knows what you like right?).

The Belacan Vermicelli smells good (to us anyway) when it was brought to our table. For those of you who knows what Belacan is, you will know it does give a pungent smell and flavour. If you like belacan, you will like this.

Suanne and I decided to order two main dishes and supplement them with rice. We ordered their Mussels in Curry. We had wanted to order their Oyster in Eggs but since they did not have oysters, we settled for this. It was great.

The curry was thick with only a little spiciness to it. What we love was their humongous and fleshy mussels. We counted twelve of them there. It was absolutely marvelous. If we come here again, we will order this again.

The Fried Green Beans on the other hand was just OK. They don’t taste very fresh (no, it’s not that they tasted stale … not at all). We expected such green beans to have a certain crunch to it which to us is a sign of freshness. But the sweet spicy sauce makes up for it.

We’ll go again to Coco Chilli and hopefully the next time they will have everything they have on the menu … and also 100% clean eating utensils.

Have any of you Richmond readers ever been to Coco Chilli before?