Beach Road/Second Road
(between Soi 6/1 and Central Road)
Pattaya

The Hard Rock Hotel is one of Pattaya’s most upmarket hotels. Situated between Beach Road and Second Road, not far north of Pattaya Central Road, it’s convenient for all Pattaya’s nightlife and attractions.

The hotel’s foyer is worth a visit even if only to look at the displays there. They have a host of pop memorabilia, from Elton John’s platform-soled boots (funny how small his feet are) to Gerri Halliwell’s purple dress!

There are several restaurants and bars at the hotel, and of course a Hard Rock Café on Beach Road. Here’s our review of the Starz Diner Restaurant.

An advert in the local paper announced that Starz had started a nightly buffet and as an introductory offer (June 2006) you could go and eat all you like for THB 550. We thought we’d give it a go.

We chose to eat outside rather than inside the air-conditioned restaurant. We were given a table by the pool - the most beautiful swimming pool we’ve ever seen - and the ambience was lovely. It was comfortable, relaxing, and the service was friendly and efficient (but not over-attentive, which really irks us). Really, it was perfect and I couldn’t criticise anything.

The food was pretty good. All top notch stuff. To be fair, we’ve been to buffets here where there is a wider choice, but what was on offer was really very good – salads, soups, main courses, barbecue (including seafood), and desserts. Very nice indeed. We agreed that we’d definitely go back (depending on how much it costs after the introductory offer period).

A big bonus that we hadn’t expected was that after we’d ordered two glasses of wine (at THB 240 – ouch!), the waitress brought the bottle to our table and said, “I’ll give you the bottle.” Nice, we thought. We didn’t realise that she actually meant she would give us the whole bottle for free and we didn’t even have to pay for the two glasses we thought we’d bought!

Thus we had a lovely evening out with great food and a bottle of wine for less than £20. We were as happy as Larry (whoever he is).

This place gets a big thumbs up from us.

Rating 4 out of 5. (Nowhere is perfect – well, not yet, anyway). Oh yes, on that point, I did note that the ladies’ toilets were a bit below par although Mr ND says that the men’s were perfectly OK. So there you go; maybe I went in at a bad time or something.

Update (July 2008):

We’ve been back a couple of times since, and it’s still consistently good; nice food, and excellent service. Admittedly the price has gone up; it’s now THB 874 (exchange rate as at 15 December 2008: £1 = THB 53.3) on all nights except Saturdays, when the price goes up to THB 1,000. On the other hand, they offer what they call free-flow service of beer, white wine and red wine (as much as you can drink, and they don’t stint in their service), so it’s still very good value for money.

By the way, we also decided to have a look at the rooms while we were there. They’re designed around a modern Zen style with oversized bed heads featuring famous rock-’n'-roll personalities. In-room facilities include wall-mounted TV, mini CD player, mini bar, tea and coffee making facilities, feather duvets and pillows. Kings Club rooms have their own separate floors with private access, one-time laundry and pressing for eight items, breakfast and evening cocktails and high speed Internet access in the Club lounge.

The rooms are small, but so well appointed that you couldn’t fail to be comfortable here.

The hotel has many other facilities: gym and spa, climbing wall, kids’ club, general store, and of course that fabulous swimming pool…

If you would like to book your stay at the Hard Rock Hotel, their rack rates start from US $125 plus 10% service charge and 7% VAT.

I found this on the Food Standards Agency website a couple of days back:

Food Standards Agency
ASDA RECALLS WHOLEFOODS ORGANIC ROASTED MIXED NUTS
Asda has recalled its Wholefoods Organic Roasted Mixed Nuts (200g) because the product contains peanuts, which are not mentioned on the product label. This means the product is a possible health risk for individuals with an allergy to peanuts. The Agency has issued an Allergy Alert.
http://www.food.gov.uk/news/newsarchive/2008/jul/peanuts

Hmm, I thought. Is this yet another one of those silly cases where Nanny’s making a company spell out the bleedin’ obvious to us?

You know the sort of thing: woman successfully sues fast food company for getting scalded because she didn’t know her coffee was going to be hot. So every fast food company adds warning labels to their coffee cups on the CYA principle.

A couple of years ago Mr Not Delia bought a bag of nuts from some supermarket chain or other and was surprised to see the words “Contains nuts” on the packet. What should he have expected it to contain? Marshmallows? Iron filings? Pixie snot?

I’m all in favour of consumers not being kept in the dark about what they’re buying. Having spent several years living in South Asia and buying spices in the local markets, I’m all too familiar with adulterated goods. (Fancy some brick dust in your chilli powder, anyone?) And I can see why someone with an allergy might want to be sure that the ready meal they’re eyeing up in Waitrose doesn’t contain an ingredient that will make it the last meal they ever eat.

But for heaven’s sake, shouldn’t there be limits to how much we let Nanny take responsibility for our lives? If someone’s so thick that they don’t realise that a bag of nuts contains nuts, it sounds to me as if we ought to let natural selection have free rein.

Anyway, back to the Asda alert. A quick bit of research showed that in fact this isn’t one of those cases. It turns out that peanuts aren’t nuts at all. They’re actually legumes - like peas, lentils and, for the horticulturally inclined, lupins. And it’s perfectly possible that someone with a peanut allergy isn’t allergic to true nuts, and vice versa.

So if you’re planning to cook for guests, and you know one of your guests has a nut allergy, you may still be able to use your favourite peanut oil. But better check first, eh?

11a Leith Street
Georgetown
Penang
Malaysia

Walking along Georgetown’s Leith Street on a recent visit to Penang, we had a flyer thrust at us as we passed the row of restaurants and bars opposite Cheong Fatt Tze’s mansion. It was from Passage Thru’ India, and proudly boasted that it had been voted the best Indian curry restaurant in Malaysia by some tourist organisation or other.

Yeah, right. We’ve heard that sort of claim before. Nevertheless, it was a long time since Mr Not Delia and I had had a proper curry, so the following evening he and I nipped down the road from our hotel and went to investigate. (If you look closely at the photo above, you can see Mr Not Delia sitting inside.)

The PTI’s décor plays heavily to the Indian theme – plenty of fairy lights outside, lots of Indian memorabilia (including a lot of Rajasthani dolls and statuettes) inside. It would be easy to do this in a tacky way, but it works very attractively in the PTI; the atmosphere is exotic without being over-fussy.

We arrived at about eight o’clock - about an hour after opening time - and were the only customers there. This was a bit disconcerting, but we suspect the reason is that people don’t generally eat until relatively late in Penang; it did start to get busier as the evening progressed.

Sitting at our table with two bottles of Tiger, Mr ND and I perused the menu. The PTI’s style of food is very much in the tradition of the British “Indian” restaurant rather than a regional genuine Indian one, so thankfully we weren’t presented with a whole range of Mughlai favourites like mutter paneer (peas and cheese) or dal makhani (brown lentils in butter). Mind you, they don’t do dosas or other South Indian specialities either.

Here’s a quick preview of the menu, section by section, together with prices (in Malaysian ringgit (RM) - the exchange rate as of July 2008 was RM6.50 = £1):

Soups & salads

Garden salad – RM8. This was fresh and full of flavour. Very nice!

Entrées

Vegetarian

Madras bhaji – RM6. These were more like light little pakoras than the big claggy lumps you get in your usual UK curry house. Tasty – thanks perhaps to the liberal sprinkling of curry leaves – but a bit on the dry side.

Aloo jeera – RM 8

Non-vegetarian

Chicken samosa – RM7

Kashmiri lollypops (sic) – RM8

Main courses

Chicken (murgh)

Murgh tikka butter masala – RM13. Nothing actually wrong with it, but a little disappointing; we’ve had some much more complex and satisfying ones.

Khodi gunthur – RM13

Fish (machilli)

Fish do pyaza – RM14

Marina meen – RM14

Prawn (jingha)

Kadai jingha – RM15. This basic prawn curry was very much like a prawn bhuna, without the oomph. I experimented by adding a little of the roghan josh sauce to it, which improved it. (One major plus point was that the prawns had been properly cleaned. There’s very little more off-putting than buying a prawn dish in a restaurant and finding that the intestinal thread hasn’t been removed – many supposedly posh hotel buffets are guilty of this.)

PTI prawn masala – price varies according to season. We discovered that it was literally a single king prawn that was served. Very tasty, though.

Lamb (gosht)

Roghan josh – RM14. We were warned that this would be spicy. Fine, we said. If you don’t like spicy food, what are you doing in a curry house? In the event it was reasonably spicy, with good complexity of flavour.

Gosht vindaloo – RM14

Vegetables (subji)

Tadka dal – RM11

Urulai varuval – RM11. This was a South Indian dish of potato chunks fried with spices. Mr ND liked it; I thought it was OK.

Channa masala – RM11. We were expecting a dry dish of spiced chick peas, so were a bit surprised when they arrived in a spicy gravy. (Silly really – the clue was in the name of the dish.) But this was very nice.

Palak paneer – RM11. (If you think you’re getting a review of this, forget it. Having lived in Delhi for three years, we’re sick to the back teeth of paneer.)

Rice (chawal)

Dhum biryani – RM15

Green peas pulao – RM9
(We never bother with rice when we’re out for an Indian – give us naan every time.)

From the tandoor

Chicken tikka – RM15

Kashgar kebab – RM15

Roti/breads

Butter naan – RM4. Despite the name, this was more like a chapati than a naan. Still good enough to soak up the gravy with, though.

Pratha – RM4

Desserts

Rasmalai – RM4

Kulfi - RM6

This isn’t even half of what the menu offers, but it gives you a fair idea of the range and the prices.
The quality of food is consistently pretty good. (We’ve been back twice since, and it’s been enjoyable every time, although the actual dishes themselves have varied a bit in how they’re made – maybe they have a different chef on some nights.)

Note that, compared to many British “Indian” restaurants, the portions are quite a bit smaller – and cheaper. This is great if there are only two of you, as it means you can still order a wide variety of dishes in the knowledge that you’re not going to be drastically over-ordering. And with even the most expensive dishes at only about £2.50, it won’t break the bank either.

The service is great! There was a three-month gap between our first and second visits, but they remembered us. (On our first visit we’d been sitting underneath the air-conditioning unit and had commented on the cold, so when we visited the second time and went to sit at the same table they suggested we’d be more comfortable at a table further inside the restaurant.) They were very friendly and helpful on all three occasions; when we still had a few nibbly bits of bhaji left at the end of the meal, they cheerfully bagged them up for us to enjoy back in the hotel room.

Overall rating: 4 out of 5

The Passage Thru’ India may not offer the best Indian food in the world. But what it does do is provide good quality British-style Indian food, in conveniently sized and competitively priced servings and amid attractive and comfortable surroundings. We’ve been back twice already and no doubt will go again the next time we fancy a curry in Penang.