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.

GL-12 BB Park Plaza Low Yat No. 7
Jalan Bukit Bintang
55100 Kuala Lumpur

We’d seen the Outback Steakhouse while wandering around just by our hotel in KL’s Bukit Bintang district. It looked very appealing, so one evening we decided to give it a try.

I sat down and ordered two beers, while Mr Not Delia nipped off to dump the shopping in our hotel room. The beers arrived just before he got back. He’d barely had time to sit down, catch his breath and take his first swig of beer when a waiter appeared and asked if we were ready to order. We asked for five minutes to have a chance to read the menu properly. Two minutes later, up popped another waiter. Were we ready to order? When the third asked, we suggested politely that we could let them know when we were ready. The pressure was a bit unnerving, all the more so since the restaurant wasn’t even busy at the time.

This wasn’t a promising start, but things got worse.

We were confused by the menu. They offered various steaks, with prescribed accompaniments. At the top of the page we were told that all “Land Rovers” were accompanied by a choice of various accompaniments – baked potato, Aussie chips, grilled onions, mixed steamed veg, corn-on-the-cob… but nowhere in the menu were we told what a “Land Rover” was. Eventually we called over a waitress, who explained that a “Land Rover” was simply a steak and that we could choose whatever accompaniments we wanted, rather than the ones laid down in the menu descriptions.

At last we settled on crab cakes and a Caesar salad for starters, and a Victoria’s Filet [sic] done medium rare with additional peppercorn sauce, but with Aussie chips and grilled onions instead of the prescribed corn-on-the-cob, mixed veg and mashed potato. Confusion clouded the waiter’s face as we tried, several times, to explain this. He called over a colleague. We explained again. Now we had two confused waiters on our hands. Eventually someone who appeared to be the boss came over to sort things out… and it even took a while for him to grasp the concept. But, just as Mr ND and I were considering that it was too much trouble and that we should try elsewhere, the penny appeared to finally drop. At last, we thought. But even after the order had been taken to the kitchen, a waitress came over to reconfirm with us what we’d ordered as they were still confused.

The crab cakes arrived. They were rather fishy – and somewhat soggy, because the salsa had been piled on top of them rather than placed to the side – but they were edible, although our appetites weren’t helped by the sudden blaring of loud dance music booming from the Bangkok Jam restaurant next door (the same music, presumably, that previous guests at our hotel had complained about when writing reviews for TripAdvisor.com). And then, when we were barely halfway through eating them…

…the steak and the Caesar salad arrived together. As I’ve said, we explained when we ordered that we wanted the Caesar salad as a starter – and the steak, of course, should have been prepared so that it was ready after we’d had our starter. I put the crab cakes to one side immediately; after all, you want to eat steak when it’s hot, not tepid.

The meal didn’t look that great, to be honest. The “Aussie chips” were bog-standard frozen fries, the grilled onions looked anaemic and rather as if they’d simply been sweated off, and the peppercorn sauce looked like a thin gravy, with no evidence of any peppercorns anywhere. Still, I cut myself a small portion of the steak – noting as I did so that it wasn’t medium rare, but blue (not a problem; I like my meat bloody) – and took a mouthful.

I spat it out as quickly as I decently could. It was stone cold.

We complained to a waiter, who fetched the owner. He was most apologetic and suggested that he could ask the kitchen to “heat it up a little”. He even offered us another meal. But by that time we’d lost our appetites, and our patience with the Keystone Cops-style service, altogether. He agreed to knock the price of the steak off the bill (big of him) but insisted that everyone else enjoyed eating there and that many people said it was the best meal they’d ever had.

Later on, we mentioned our bad experience to one of the waiters in Delaney’s, the Irish pub in our hotel. He was surprised; the Outback was one of the top-rated restaurants in KL. Maybe they had a new chef?

Overall rating: 0 out of 5

I don’t remember having had such a bad meal anywhere since breakfast at the Koala Bar in Siem Reap (which has since closed down). There was total confusion over their own menu, cold steak, and totally crap service. On their website the owner proclaims his “Desire to achieve excellence in the hospitality business, establishing benchmarks, all along striving for customer ecstasy”. Let’s just say he didn’t do it for us.

Is the Outback Steakhouse in KL the worst restaurant in the world? Well, maybe not – I did get some rather boingy goat kebabs in a roadside greasy spoon in Kurdistan once. Perhaps it’s just the most over-rated.

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.