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.

Jalan Bukit Bintang

The Ship is one of a chain of six restaurants: two in KL, four elsewhere in Malaysia (including Penang). We visited the one in Jalan Bukit Bintang, although there’s another in Jalan Sultan Ismail.

Actually, we hadn’t set out intending to go to the Ship at all, even though it does bill itself as providing “The Best Steak In Town”. (Beef isn’t our favourite meat, although both of us enjoy a steak from time to time.) But as we were passing, a waitress invited us to look at the menu – and we were happy enough to do that, since she didn’t then harass us by hovering over our shoulder, pointing at individual dishes and telling us their names. (Why do so many whippers-in do that? Do they think we can’t read?) The range looked good and the prices seemed reasonable, so we went inside.

Almost immediately we thought we’d been struck blind! It was so dark we were struggling to see the floor in front of us, which made it difficult to follow the waitress showing us to our alcove table. However, we got there in the end. The two beers we ordered arrived quickly, and we settled down to decide what we were going to eat. Neither of us was ravenously hungry at that stage, and we hesitated to order two big meals at once in case the food was inedible. So we decided we would try to order the seafood platter as a shared starter, and then perhaps order a further meal if we liked what we’d eaten so far. Time to summon a waiter.

Mr ND had noticed a small orange panel with three buttons at the wall end of the table; one to call for service, one to call for dessert, and one to ask for the bill. When he pressed the service button, a waiter duly appeared. We explained that we’d like to share the seafood platter as a starter, and maybe order a further dish if we were still hungry. He didn’t seem at all thrown by this request.

When the platter arrived, we found it consisted largely of breaded items: two small pieces of fish, two crabmeat balls, a few scallops, two prawns and a couple of pieces of (non-breaded) squid. I described it as “breadcrumbs garnished with a bit of seafood”. The scallops were like little rubber bullets, though not as tough as the squid, which Mr ND couldn’t even manage to cut. But the prawns had been cleaned properly, the fish was tasty enough if not exceptional, and the crabmeat balls were fine if you eat that sort of thing (Mr ND does, I don’t.) The accompanying chips were of the frozen crinkle-cut variety. So not a gourmet feast, but good enough value for money to encourage us to try sharing a steak meal.

The menu offered a wide range of steak options. Some of them sounded intriguing, but in the end we went for a fillet steak in green pepper sauce, done rare. We ordered a side salad in addition to the vegetables which came with the steak, and asked if a baked potato could be substituted for the chips, which was fine. Again, it was no problem to share the meal; in fact, we didn’t ask to do this, but the staff clearly picked up on the fact that we’d been consulting on what to order and brought two sets of cutlery of their own accord.

The steak was beautifully done and very tasty. So was the the green pepper sauce, although it unexpectedly contained green capsicums as well as green peppercorns. The plate arrived with chips on rather than a baked potato, but a quick word with the waiter soon brought a further plate with one of the smallest baked potatoes we’ve ever seen. The vegetables were of the tinned mixed veg type and most unappetising. So it was just as well we’d ordered the salad too. The salad was all right, although the asparagus it contained was flabby and tasteless. We were offered a choice of French dressing or Thousand Island dressing, and opted for the French dressing, which was almost solid and consisted mostly of garlic paste. Good job we like garlic!

Overall rating: 2½-3 out of 5 for food; 4 out of 5 for service
It’s highly unlikely that we’d ever go back to the Ship again on the strength of its food, which was mediocre and pretty much what you’d expect from a chain – a lot of tinned, pickled, frozen or processed ingredients. But the steak was undeniably very good. We left feeling that our hunger had been satisfied, at least; the beer was very reasonably priced, too; and you’d go a long way before you’d find service as helpful and friendly as the staff in the Ship. All in all, we thought it was very good value for money.