Just back from lunch and thinking dreamily of a website concept: Shit Restaurants of KL. This would focus particularly on restaurants which have superb reviews – in the first case because they have clearly paid off a reviewer, and in the second because they are instagrammable but the food and experience isn’t up to the mark.
Entry number 1: Manja at Old Malaya, obscenely priced, uninispiringly decorated (Shezan tries to renew itself) and inadequate service (they ran out of napkins and had to be asked twice to bring even a paper napkin), and that’s before we even get to the food. Small portions of ‘premium’ ingredients (specks of roe on a crabcake with stale smelling crumb, adding nothing but evoking caviar) poorly used (rocket more wilted than at Mercado) to create flat flavours (prawns on toast that would fit well in a Pret sandwich, though crowned with a single strand of microgreen). Imported ingredients to impress – why would you have Greenland halibut on a menu in KL? A poor show, and a waste of a good location.