Missed yesterday as we were out all day. The GF had to participate in a roundtable at the Sunway Convention Centre, so I tagged along, planning to get my waxing and threading done from one of the small 1-room beauty parlours surrounding the Sunway complex. We stopped on the way for a quick lunch of what is supposed to be one of the char siew in KL – not as nice as Siu Siu, but still very good, in my view. It was absolutely pouring with rain.
Sunway itself is truly ridiculous. It is a massive estate owned by a local billionaire and includes a Sunway University as well as several overseas branches of Australian universities. It includes a waterpark / amusement park, hotels, convention centre, etc. It also includes a tiger sanctuary with a walkway leading over it, an ice rink, a mall with a pyramid theme crowned with a 50 foot fibreglass lion, domes, turrets, spires, windmills; you name the naffness and you will find it at Sunway.
I had found Khoobsurat Beauty Parlour on the internet and it turned out to be a 1 room wonder as expected, above an Indian restaurant, manned by a woman and her daughter who did the quickest, most efficient waxing I have ever experienced, with the daughter applying the wax and the mother ripping it off with both hands. I was out in 20 minutes with arms and legs nicely smooth. Not the best waxing – bits of me were left bruised, and they weren’t as careful about removing the wax afterwards as I like, especially considering that I wouldn’t be able to go straight home for a shower. But it certainly got the job done.
When the GF finally tottered out of his roundtable we went off to dinner at Dewakan which turned out to be truly astonishing. By some margin the best high end meal I’ve had in SE Asia. Dewakan is the training restaurant for a hospitality school, and the waitstaff certainly had that well-meaning ineptitude one expects. But the food was very good indeed. Unashamedly molecular, high on presentation and using local tastes and ingredients to superb effect. The most memorable was a roasted quail in garam masala with powdered century egg, beef and candlenut. It was a superb mix of flavours, really interestingly put together, for a meat I’m not actually that fond of. A mulberry snow and jammed fruit came with cardamom ganache (basically a barfi), cashew brittle and cashew leaves. Fantastic combination. Even the weakest courses – a roasted duck that didn’t stand out from other good roast ducks I’ve had, and a chocolate tart which was much the same aside from the addition of jackfruit, were still very good, just not as interesting as the rest.
We had the 10 course menu which came with I think 4 amuses bouche and a palate cleanser. Great value for money. I wish it wasn’t so far away (it’s right on the edge of Shah Alam), but I suppose that’s what keeps the price down. Such a delight, though, to find interesting high end food in KL. As we discussed with the chef afterwards, far too much high end cooking in KL is not confident or adventurous with its local strengths. Instead it goes for lashings of cream, foie gras or Japanese inspirations, none of which are understood well, or have ingredients of sufficiently high quality accessible here.