What do you do after you’ve had a bad experience when you’ve ordered a particular dish?

There are two basic approaches you can take. One of them is the “once bitten, twice shy” approach; you may have been put off the dish in question for weeks or months, or even for life if the experience was bad enough. Or you can take the view that the “falling off a horse” strategy is better – go out again the following day and try ordering the same thing somewhere else.

After our dismal experience at the Outback Steakhouse in Kuala Lumpur’s Bukit Bintang district, we weren’t too sure that we fancied a steak meal again. So when hunger pangs started to hit us the following day, steak wasn’t the first thing on our minds.

As it happened, we were at the Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC) for the Expat Expo at the time. We remembered that last year we’d drunk at a nice bar and restaurant just outside the main Suria shopping centre, but hadn’t ordered any food. So we headed there again to see what they had to offer.

Santini – as the bar’s called – offers a range of light meals, with the emphasis strongly (though by no means exclusively, as you’ll see) on Italian pasta ‘n’ pizza. We ordered a couple of draught Tigers and decided we fancied sharing a pizza to go with it. Choosing one proved difficult, as I don’t really like meat on pizzas all that much – especially if it’s chicken ham or beef salami – and the only vegetarian option appeared to be the bog-standard Pizza Margherita. However, we decided to order a small Quattro Stagioni, without the chicken ham, and hoped that they’d be able to prepare that without problems.

We weren’t disappointed. Our pizza arrived with a generous topping of artichokes, black olives and mushrooms to make up for the thankfully absent chicken ham. The base was beautifully thin, with a crispy crust around the edge. It tasted delicious.

Emboldened by this, I was tempted to find out more about the menu. My eye had been caught by a wonderful-sounding steamed sea bass, so I asked the waitress about it. Would she recommend it? “The steaks are better,” she answered. Steak? It wasn’t even on the Santini menu. “You can get steaks from the San Francisco Steakhouse next door,” she told us. (The Santini and the San Francisco Steakhouse are owned by the same company.)

Hmm… Last night’s effort had been a complete fiasco, primarily because of the Outback’s bumbling staff. But these people seemed clued-up. And the pizza had been really good. Was the steak worth a try?

Cut forward a couple of hours, and Mr Not Delia and I were both getting really hungry – after all, we’d only ordered a small pizza as a stop-gap. (Larger ones were available, and we’d seen a few people tucking into them with evident enjoyment, but we were after a snack at the time.) So we returned to the San Francisco Steakhouse.

Neither of us were interested in starters as such, so we launched straight in with an order of a medium-rare fillet steak with black pepper sauce, with side orders of a salad and onion rings.

The salad and onion rings arrived first. The onion rings were OK, if a bit bland; at least they were hot and crispy, and they went nicely with the ranch sauce that accompanied them. The salad, on the other hand, was fresh, nicely dressed, and very enjoyable. But we reined ourselves in – partly to save space for the steak, partly to make clear to the waiting staff that we intended these as accompaniments, not appetisers.

We were just starting to wonder where the steak was, and whether we’d specified that we wanted the steak brought as soon as it was ready, when the waitress appeared at our table to ask that very question. Full marks to her for initiative. (No marks to Mr ND for not telling her in the first place. Grr!)

What a wonderful contrast with the horrible experience at the Outback. The steak was cooked to perfection, and melted away in the mouth as you chewed it. Most importantly, it was still hot! The sauce was rich and peppery without taking anything away from the delicious flavour of the steak. The corn-on-the-cob that came with it was tasty and just ever so slightly blackened on the outside. To be honest, we weren’t that interested in the veg – but for what it’s worth, the cauliflower was perfect: beautifully crisp and tasting just as fresh cauliflower should. The chips were – well, chips. But certainly nothing wrong with them.

Overall rating: 4½ out of 5
It’s a pity that this place couldn’t be transported to Bukit Bintang! As it is, it’s a great place to eat and drink if you’re up at the KLCC.

402 Lebuh Chulia
Georgetown
Penang

It was late in the evening, and we were getting hungry. We needed to eat and fancied Italian for a change, but there weren’t any Italian places just around the corner in the pedestrianised north end of Jalan Penang. A bit of research on the Internet turned up Ecco in Lebuh Chulia. Lebuh Chulia is a long street, but we hoped we might be lucky and find it at the end closer to the Bayview Hotel, where we were staying.

We almost walked past it! We saw a backpacker coffee shop-type of place – one of the converted shophouses catering to the itinerant student crowd, with basic furnishings and decor. So we decided we might as well go there rather than traipsing for hours down Chulia. A quick glance at the menu revealed that we had in fact arrived where we’d intended to come in the first place.

(We later discovered a sign on the chick-blind between the gallery and the street, and a menu display which we’d have seen if we’d been walking along Chulia in the other direction. But there was no kind of signage visible from the direction we were walking in…)

We sat down and looked at the menu. It was short, but laid emphasis on natural, freshly-prepared ingredients and hand-made pasta and pizza dough. This sounded encouraging. After a friendly chat with the waiter, we suddenly realised that time was marching on and it was only 25 minutes until their closing time! So we ordered, and prepared ourselves for a wait – which in the end wasn’t very long at all.

Bread and salad arrived first. The focaccia was delicious, with a thick spreading of pesto (rather than a dip as such). The mixed garden salad was appetisingly presented, with a lovely herby olive oil dressing. This was encouraging!

The pasta and pizza arrived shortly afterwards. The pasta Salvatore wasn’t exactly what we expected (spaghetti, according to the menu); it turned out to be much more like tagliatelle, but with strands of a similar length to the longest spaghetti you can think of! Not being a big fan of salami in pasta, I picked out the bits from mine; but the pasta wasn’t overloaded with them anyway – there was just enough of it to give a flavour without dominating, and plenty of evidence of the mushrooms, olives and basil tomato sauce, with just a hint of spice from the red chili flakes; excellent! Our pizza fungi (sic) with an additional topping of capsicum was deliciously thin and crispy. The topping was juicy and fresh, with plenty of cheese, but not overwhelmingly so.

And to wash it down we ordered our usual Tiger – which came cheap at just RM7.50 for a 330ml glass. (It costs RM7.20 per can in Happy Mart and 7-Eleven, and is usually at least RM8 in the bars we’ve been to.)

At the end of the meal we were lucky enough to have the chance of a quick chat with the chef/owner, Law Soo Hock. You’d never think it, but he’s had no formal training as a chef, has never been to Italy, and has only been cooking for four years! But he’s passionate about fresh, home-prepared ingredients, and it’s clear he loves what he does – both from talking to him and from eating his food.

Overall rating: 4½ out of 5
This was as good a pizza ‘n’ pasta meal as we’ve had for a long time, and excellent value too. If you love Italian food, this is a great place to come. The only thing we’d like to see is some cream-based pasta sauces – maybe next time?

Bar Street
Siem Reap
Cambodia

As our stay in Siem Reap in July 2006 drew to a close, we took a fancy to some pizza for a change. So we all went hunting for a suitable restaurant. After checking out a couple, we finally settled on Pissa Italiana.

All the Bar Street open-air tables were taken, so we went inside. But the wood-fired oven was producing a fair amount of both heat and smoke, so we hesitated to sit down there. Fortunately they’ve got tables out at the back, in a little alleyway running parallel to Bar Street. Sitting out there was surprisingly pleasant, with more of the air of a Mediterranean town back street than a South East Asian one. And there were very few hassles from passing beggars (actually, we’re struggling to think of any).

We ordered a salad with scallops from Sihanoukville in balsamic vinegar, a tagliatelle carbonara, and a vegetarian pizza. We had some doubts about the pizza, though; the menu listed spinach and cauliflower alongside more conventional ingredients like mushrooms, onions and tomatoes. But we asked the waitress if she could have one made without spinach and cauliflower. She said this was possible, and confirmed it when she read the order back to us. So that was all right.

Or so we thought, anyway. When the pizza (which was rectangular) arrived, it was certainly brassica-free as requested. However, in a bid to ensure we got our money’s worth, the chef had replaced the spinach and cauliflower with courgette (fair enough) and carrot! Still, he’d also arranged the veg in rows across the pizza rather than in the more traditional mix-it-all-in-together arrangement, so it was an easy matter to remove the row of carrot. This left two pieces of tomato-only pizza, but better that than carrot-and-tomato. The other slices were also two-veg combos. All in all, a strange pizza experience, but there was no faulting the quality of the cooking – it was served hot, with a good thin base. We ate it all, anyway (apart from the carrot), so we must have enjoyed it! The carbonara was very good too.

What really set the meal apart was the scallop salad. We thought that for six dollars we’d be getting a respectable number of scallops, perhaps as many as a dozen. There were at least twice that number – and not tiny little ones, a decent size – all beautifully cooked, in other words just ever so slightly underdone. Wonderful stuff! And with a nice bottle of Kiwi Sauv Blanc to set it off, too.

Visit Two: October 2006

Our second visit was something of a spur-of-the-moment decision. We’d had a huge disappointment earlier in the day from the Koala Bar, and decided that we weren’t wanting to risk another, so we thought something suitable might be available from Pissa Italiana – though neither of us particularly fancied pizza, with or without carrot.

The staff remembered us – “You ordered the Sileni Sauvignon Blanc, didn’t you?”! We promptly ordered the same bottle again, and it was every bit as delicious as the previous time.

Looking at the menu, we were mystified by the “Risotto back from kept” (it turned out to mean “catch of the day”), but settled for the tuna carpaccio, which was superb, and the garlic bread, which was very tasty. The tagliatelle carbonara was just as good as the previous time.

We were disappointed to see that scallops weren’t on the menu. Mr Not Delia nevertheless thought it was worth asking for them, just in case, and we were delighted to be told that we could have them, though we were warned that it would be a different chef this time and she had never done them before. Unfortunately, when they arrived they were terribly overdone, like little rubber bullets. When we pointed this out, the manager was very apologetic and told us that the chef would prepare another (at no extra charge, even though they could justifiably have said that we’d ordered at our own risk). The second attempt was not much better, though the scallops were at least edible. But we really couldn’t blame the staff – they were doing their best to accommodate an off-menu request.

Overall rating: 4 out of 5
OK, so the pizza was a bit bizarre the first time round, and the off-menu scallops disappointed the second time. But other than that you’d be struggling to fault it – you’d struggle to find food as good in London for just $14. They’d charge you a damn sight more than $22 for a bottle of New Zealand wine, too. Excellent friendly service, neither over-fussy nor under-attentive, and a relaxing atmosphere.