Red Tomato @ Pantai Cenang, Langkawi

It has been more than a decade that I last been to Langkawi. I truly enjoyed my recent trip here, and I think Langkawi is one of the places that tourists to Malaysia ought to visit. 

I fully depended on reviews on Trip Advisor for recommendation of F&B outlets. 

Red Tomato is one of the outlets that is top on their list, and best of all, it is located strategically at Pantai Cenang area. 

I love their very inviting entrance, and the restaurant was in fact filled with customers. 

Entrance of Red Tomato

A look towards the outside seating, from inside

Busy restaurant 

We ordered their salad as starter, and do expect long wait for your food. We waited close to 30 minutes, for our first dish, the salad to be served. 

This was filled with lots of greens, tomatoes, avocado, mango, cucumber, cranberries and smoked pepper tuna. There were all so fresh, and the slight salty smoked pepper tuna truly complimented the salad, and with a taste of mango sweetness, this was a yummy salad. 

Wellness Salad. Price-RM30.50

 The Carbonara was cooked to perfection. We requested for chicken to replaced its chicken ham that was originally listed in their menu. The sauce was creamy enough and overall was a tasty plate of pasta. 

Carbonara. Price-RM26

For its pizza, there is a choice of either the margherita or the basil pesto, which came with the basic ingredients, ie. tomato or basil pesto, with mozzarella cheese. 
As for additional toppings, each item is priced at either RM2 or RM4, which we opted for salami and fresh mushroom. 

We were very pleased with the thin and crispy pizza, and it was certainly delicious. 

Pizza. 

We left with happy stomach, and yes, this is truly a recommended restaurant. 

Food - 9/10, Price - 8/10, Service - 7/10, Ambiance - 8/10

Red Tomato 
5 Casa Fina Avenue, 
Pantai Cenang, 
Langkawi, Kedah 

Tel : 012-513 6046 / 604-955 4055

Business Hours : 9am-10.30pm daily 

Chili's Grill & Bar @ Jaya, Petaling Jaya

My most frequented Western restaurant ought to be Chili's Grill & Bar. This brand from Texas, Dallas first entered Malaysia in 1994, and I will always remember this to be my favorite Western restaurant for dining amongst friends and family. 

Having opened its latest outlet at Jaya Shopping Centre, I made my way there to have my dinner, and also to check out one of this latest neighborhood mall.

The entrance of Chili's at Jaya Mall

I have always liked the ambiance of Chilli's, which gave a very Westernize feeling, and customers can opt for the normal dining area or the bar area for drinking purpose.

The arrangement of seating are pretty much the same across their outlets, and this outlets holds some big mirror and walls that comes in colorful strips, kept close to Chilli's colors. 

Seating that maximize their space

My all time favorite has to be Triple Play, now also known as Triple Dipper. This order is good as appetizer for a few to share, or as a main meal for one or two. 

It is a platter combining 3 of Chilli's favorite appetizers, which includes Chicken Crispers, Wings Over Buffalo and Southwestern Eggrolls that comes with 3 different sauces for dipping. 

The Wings Over Buffalo are chicken drumette marinated in their spicy buffalo wing sauce which is done perfectly, as I could taste the marination even to its bones. It has a very crispy texture, and well fried. 

The Southwestern Eggrolls carries a soft and crispy tortilla wrapping around the ingredients, which includes smoked chicken, jalapenos, black bean, corn, green pepper and spinach. This has always been my favorite, as the mix of ingredients blends in well with the cheesiness within, and the crispiness of the tortilla.

The Chicken Crispers are fried and battered chicken stripes. As much as it still taste good, but over the years, this has significantly dropped in its standard, as the batter coating the chicken mostly fall off the meat, and oil is visible within the batter. 

Triple Dipper. Price-RM32.95

At times I crave for their Quesadilla and at same time, would like to be a little healthy, thus I choose to have the Quesadilla Explosion Salad. This salad comes with 4 pieces of quesadilla filled with cheese, and the salad comes with grilled chicken, tortilla strips, lots of lettuce, tomatoes, cilantros, and lots of cheese. The dressing being vinaigrette gives a sourish taste, that makes you wanting for more. 

The overall salad was really fresh and I was pleased with the amount of the salad that builds up like a small mountain in the middle of the plate. 

Quesadilla Explosion Salad. Price-RM26.95

The blackberry and strawberry sparkling soda was yummy with a good taste of both. Lemonade tasted good too.

Blackberry Strawberry Sparkling Soda & Lemonade. Price-RM9.95 each

All this while, we have been highly satisfied with the food quality served in Chilli's, and the standard of cleanliness. However, for this particular visit to this outlet, we were somewhat disappointed with the quality of the cleanliness of its cutlery, whereby even after requesting for the 2nd time, we were still not happy with the stain looking fork and knife, and had to wash them ourselves before using.

Chilli's Grill & Bar 
Jaya Shopping Centre
Jalan Semangat 
46100 Petaling Jaya 
Tel : 03-7931 5719

Business Hours : 
Sun-Thu : 11am-11pm, Fri-Sat : 11am-12am 

Fat Boys @ Publika, Kuala Lumpur

Publika is occupied with good F&B outlets, that one will be so spoilt for choices. 

Having heard much about food at Fat Boy's, I was up to give it a try as I passed by its very vibrant entrance. Fat Boy's has a simple interior that will make their customers at ease, and I observed many of its crowd are of family crowd. 

Vibrant entrance 

The logo of Fat Boy's is a cute one to represent 'Fat Boy'. Its as though its saying 'you better trust this Fat Boy, or else I may be upset'. Haha... Its just my crazy interpretation. 

Fascinated with the fierce looking logo

Fat Boy's specialize in burgers, and its interesting that there are options of choosing exactly what you fancy, to go in your burger, where they introduce a 4 steps process, where you can choose your bun, patty, add-ons (such as fried egg, bacon, mushroom, and the list goes on), and lastly the sauces. Each selection will cost from as low as RM1 to RM14. I liked the idea of such customization made available by Fat Boy's. 

However, our appetite doesn't call for burger that evening. Oh, fret not, there , thus, there are in fact many other choices made available by Fat Boy's. 

We started the meal with Chicken Caesar Salad. It was served on a chilled aluminium plate, whereby the romaine lettuce, too, was chilled. Salad truly taste so much better when served chilled. Their version of salad is not overly fancy, yet topped with the basic ingredients made right. Its topped with lots of parmesan cheese, crunchy croutons, and credit goes to the absolutely delicious grilled chicken. The chicken carried an apparent crisp from the grilling process, and despite it being breast meat, every bite was so tasty. And I appreciate that The Fat Boy's version of salad is value for money, and its served with big sized chicken which was then sliced. One of the best salad in town. 

Chicken Caesar Salad. Price-RM17  

My friend ordered the Chicken Parmigiana, where it was chicken breast coated with parmesan cheese and pan fried, served with tomato, some vegetable and a slice of cheese on toasted ciabatta bread. The main dish was served with steak cut fries. 

The overall combined taste of the ingredients was satisfactory. 

Chicken Parmigiana. Price-RM19

The Honey Mustard Chicken Kebab was another delicious dish. It was served with their house salad, with vinaigrette dressing. There's enough green within the salad, with rocket salad, capsicum, lettuce, topped with cherry tomatoes. Nice mix to the colors. 
The breast meat chicken was grilled together with onions, and capsicums. The chicken was tasty, and the process of grilling truly brought out the natural sweetness of the onion and capsicum. Despite given honey mustard sauce separately, I felt that the sauce drizzled onto my kebab was sufficient.
The mashed potatoes has a really fine and smooth texture, and it almost melted in my mouth. And sufficient brown sauce was given. 
This chicken was dish was good, however, I still felt that the grilled chicken from the Caesar Salad tasted much better. 

Honey Mustard Chicken. Price-RM25

All our 3 dishes were chicken dishes. No complaint as they tasted good, however, would certainly be back to try their other offerings, and surely, their burger.

Fat Boy's The Burger Bar 
Lot 30 Level G2 Publika 
No.1 Jalan Dutamas 1 Solaris Dutamas, 
50480 Kuala Lumpur

Tel : 03-6206 1352 

Business Hours : 
11am-11pm, except for Fri & Sat, till 12mn

FB link, here

Website link, here

Naked @ Plaza Damas, Kuala Lumpur

Does having a catchy name such as 'Naked' garner more attention? Possibly. The founder, Marco Robinson is an author, entrepreneur and property expert, and believe that Naked is built on foundation of passion. A passion for sexy food, wicked entertainment and naughty drinks. Hmm... How interesting. 

Naked is located at a corner lot, at Plaza Damas, and one will not need to worry, as they have ads and signages around Plaza Damas. 

Some parts are not to be exposed 

At time of my visit, the upstairs seating area is not open to customers yet, however, will soon be opened. I was graciously offered by their staff to check out the upstairs area. 
Cosy and good use of space. 

Upstairs seating area, overseeing the kitchen

Naked offers the right environment not just for dining, but also a nice place for drinks. 

Lots of alcohol in the house 

We were not entirely hungry, thus ordered their Classic Caesar Salad, with option of Chicken with additional RM5 charge. The salad combines baby romaine, poached egg, crispy herb crostini and shaved cheese. Of all the crostini to accompany caesar salad that I've tried, I must say that Naked's crostini does stand out with its nice distinctive aroma of garlic used to made it. And the toast was done with perfection, as it was nice crunch in every bite. 

The poached egg was a good change from the normal hard boiled egg. 

We wanted to avoid the typical caesar dressing that accompanies this salad, we requested for replacement of sauce, and we were given the lime sauce. I love the sourish and tanginess of the sauce, which at the same time was a light sauce. 

We opted for additional chicken for the salad, which was cubes of chicken. Portion and size of the chicken was a little smaller than what I expected. 

Classic Caesar Salad. Price-RM20. Add Chicken. Price-RM25

The Naked House Pizza was the other choice we made. It was filled with herb marinated roast chicken breast, pickled jalapenos, red onions, mushrooms, topped with some fresh chives.

It was a really big sized pizza, filled with lots of cheese. However, the taste of all the combined ingredients doesn't make this a too tasty pizza. The taste of the chicken was really mild, and perhaps require a little more stronger marination, and cut to bigger slices of chicken, as the small chunks wasn't too apparent when placed in the mouth.l 

Naked House Pizza. Price-RM40

I somehow really enjoyed the lime juice which has the right balance of sourness. 

Lime Juice. Price-RM5

A point to note is that Naked has a team of really friendly and highly attentive staffs. Nice. 

Naked Restaurant & Bar 
E-0-2 & E-1-2, Plaza Damas 
60 Jalan Hartamas 1, 
Taman Sri Hartamas, 
50480 Kuala Lumpur 

Tel : 03-6206 1623 

Business Hours : 11am-12mn daily 

Facebook link, here

Antipodean @ Telawi, Bangsar

My dear friend, Janis, has been expressing how much she loved Flat White from Antipodean, and so, when she brought another mutual friend, Chloe, to try this out, I collectively received good feedback from these 2 coffee connoisseur.

Did some search online on blogs for this place, and somehow, the food and place looked really enticing. My chi-muis agreed to meet up here, and so we had our dinner together.

I liked the setting of Atmosphere, with cool use of black and red. And it was surely apparent, that they are serious about coffee. Info I gathered from KLue is that they uses quality coffee beans roasted by Indonesia's top specialty roaster, Merdeka Coffee, which is a boutique coffee company dedicated to sourcing, selecting and roasting the best Indonesian coffee. With its fair-trade policy, they only purchase their coffee from small Indonesian growers

Inside Antipodean

1st thing to order - Flat White.. Finally get to taste! Me too really liked this, like the 'kau'-ness (thickness) in the coffee (as some flat white I tried elsewhere, are usually rather bland), and just the right after-taste feeling, of the coffee lingering within.

Flat White. Price-RM8

Order are to be made from the big size menu ie. as written on the 'blackboard' wall. Just thought that they should also have hand-out menu, for easy reference.

Antipodean's menu

They have decent amount of selections, but confined to limited choices within a selection. Eg, they sell pasta, but there isn't many types of pasta dishes to choose from. Well, suppose this is acceptable, as long as what's offered is good.

Breakfast is served throughout the day, and thus we ordered the Big Breakfast. Came with toast, choice of bacon, chicken, beef or pork sausage, mushroom, scrambled egg, and hash brown. We took the pork sausage, which was tasty, and I super loved the saute-mushroom, which was saute to perfection, and just liked chewing and feeling the texture of the mushroom. :)

Big Breakfast. Price-RM18

This has to be my No 1 favorite Asian salad. The sauce that came with this plate of salad was really yummy.. It has the right balance of sourish taste, which made everything that went along with it, tasted so good, even the fried onion was good... It has quite a fair bit of shredded chicken too.

Burmese shredded chicken salad. Price-RM15

We placed the rest of the orders, after Jane arrived, the 'very-soon' mummy-to-be.

The pasta (conchiglie) has this chewiness, that somehow went pretty well with the feta cheese. The pumpkin, too, fills in as the right combination with this pasta dish, and it was sweet.. Nice! Gives a feeling of 'healthy' despite having feta cheese in this dish.

Pumpkin, sage and feta cheese pasta. Price-RM17

I took a bite of this croissant, scramble egg with bacon. I liked the open sandwich style, as it gives us the impression, wow, there's so much to eat.. In fact, nothing will not taste good taken with bacon, as bacon has the natural aroma and saltiness that perks up your appetite.

Croissaint, scrambled egg with bacon. Price-RM16

We too had the grilled chicken with tomatoes, green bean, and balsamic vinegar... The chicken was tender, and carried a level of sweetness (think was marinated with honey as well), and topped with the balsamic vinegar, 'perfecto'!.

Grilled chicken with tomatoes, green bean, and balsamic vinegar. Price-RM18

Lots of packed coffee, ready to go

A small area for the kids. Parents will surely appreciate this corner, to keep their children a little busy

We somehow will make 'special' effort to meet, prior to a chi-mui close to giving birth (same case with Rina the other time, but too bad, she could not join us this round). Can't wait to see the little Jane popping out.. must be as good looking as the parents.. :)

From L : Jo, me, Jane, Clarice

Antipodean Cafe

20, Jalan Telawi 2, Bangsar.
Tel: 03-2282-0411

Business hours :
8am-10pm

S'mores @ The Sphere 1, Bangsar South, KL

Met up for Chloe's farewell, as she is leaving to Shanghai soon. This was my first time to Bangsar South area, and was recommended to have lunch at S'mores by Chloe and Pacino whom work around this area.



After placing order, I was like 'hai em hai ka' (for real or not?), as their set meals come in such a reasonable price..

Each set comes with choice of drink (lychee, tea or orange juice), followed by soup, main meal accompanied by 2 side dishes (2 side dishes doesn't apply to pasta order), followed by ice-cream as dessert. Whaaaatttt a deeeeeal! I was also pleasantly surprised that the portion of the main meal was in fact, biggg...



For the drink, I liked my lychee drink.

Here's the starter for 4 of us - mushroom soup

Quickly took a shot of us for remembrance, and if its not apparent, I gotta say we were 4 souls in highly good mood, thus the great conversation. We were so relaxed, and it did not felt like, we have spent a good 3 hours, just like that..



From L : Chloe, whom is leaving to Shanghai soon; Pacino, the pro photographer; followed by me & Shereen, my BFF, the expert in mind & soul



Every of the meals ordered tasted excellent. Bet no one regretted their choice. :)



Shereen took the chicken pesto cream pasta. I tried hers... I was immediately hit with a 'wow' feeling.. or maybe a double 'wow... This creamy sauce, despite it is cream based, doesn't give the overwhelming creaminess, and the chicken was well grilled, that it brought so much flavor to the taste bud. Thumbs up for this.

Chicken Pesto Cream. Price-RM12.90+ (lunch), RM15.90 (dinner)

Chloe took the aglio olio with tuna. The tuna surely brought the right combination to the pasta. Also nice.

Aglio Olio with Tuna. Price-RM10.90+ (lunch), RM13.90 (dinner)

Pacino recommended this as a must have to me, as a 1st timer. The Australian white tuna fish was grilled to perfection. I liked the dense texture of this fish, giving me a real solid feeling. Not sure if there is such a way to describe fish. The 2 side order - corn cob was ok, however, i really liked the mash pumpkin. Healthy tasting yet yummy.

Australian White Tuna. Price-RM14.90+ (lunch), RM18.90+ (dinner)

Pacino had the Swiss Chicken Corden Bleu. I forgot to ask a bite on this, however, it really did look irresistible, when it was cut open, showing what awaits, inside this piece of chicken.

Swiss Chicken Cordon Bleu. Price-RM13.50+ (lunch), RM18.50+ (dinner)

Printed frames of picture, all over the wall.

Bar counter within the restaurant, with circles used as the main deco

Back side of the restaurant.. Sufficient seating area

S'Mores, the place to be, for good food, good price

I will very very soon be visiting S'mores for the 2nd time...



S'mores

Unit G2, GF, The Sphere 1, Avenue 1,

Bangsar South 8,

Jalan Kerinchi,

59200 KL

Tel : 03-2240 0069



Business Hours :

12pm-1am (Mon-Fri), 5pm-2am (Sat), 6pm-1am (Sun)



Email : reservation@smores.com.my

Website : www.smores.com.my

The Vanilla Place @ Empire Gallery, Subang

After reading much about this little cafe that opened at Empire Gallery, I can't wait to try it out myself. The 'Tea for 2', available from 3-6pm, seems like the most worth it deal in town, priced at RM18.80. Just wanted to point out that it seemed a little misleading from the menu as it states 'Tea for 2 (RM18.80 per pax)', but it's confirmed that RM18.80 is for the entire set, meant for 2 pax.

Well, once seated, I first ordered the 'Tea for 2'... Its true, it has a long list of mini delicacies, however, of the 13 different types of dessert/finger food served, the quality of it, really wasn't there. Perhaps the most worth it is the tea for 2 pax. The excitement of being presented the mini items ended as soon as I taste the food.

Tea for 2. Price-RM18.80

All the food from the 1st tier of plates wasn't quite edible, to me. The mini cupcakes were not at all moist, and topped with hard sugar icing swirls, the cookie doesn't taste good, and so was the macaroon. It doesn't have the delicate fine taste a macaroon should present.

1st tier of plates - OUT...

The 2nd tier - mini scones was absolute dry, mini brownie was alright, and was topped with overwhelming amount of cocoa powder, which choked us, and as for the 1 big size of strawberry dipped in chocolate, nice in size, but taste sour. The chocolate helps us from finishing the strawberry.

2nd tier of plate - also OUT..

3rd tier of plate was the most decent of all.. The tomato bruschetta was real tasty, topped with lots of cut tomatoes, and avocado, the tuna sundried and tomato sandwich was alright, however the mini pie and mini quiche was just normal, with soft crust. The thing I most not like was the top hat, which has a real thin skin, with finely shaved carrots.

3rd tier - was ALRIGHT, compared to the other 2 tiers

In terms of satisfaction, thank god that we got it from the Spaghetti Carbonara as it was really tasty and good. It has really lots of cream, and loved that each bite of spaghetti, or the ham or mushroom has sufficient cream to go with it. Yumms.

Spaghetti Carbonara. Price-RM14.80

My niece went to the cake display shelf, and as much as I tried to convince her to choose Pavlova, she still wanted the Oreo Cheesecake.

Qi taking her pick

The oreo cheesecake was alright, though it won't be my absolute favorite. Its a very dense texture piece of cheesecake, with a little oreo here and there. It also has this thick chocolate that served as the base, and by the side.

Oreo Cheesecake

In terms of the right cosy atmosphere, The Vanilla Place will be the right fit.

Cosy

Spot this cafe in the middle, while walking towards Toy 'R Us.

The Vanilla Place
Level 1 - Empire Shopping Gallery,
Subang Jaya
Tel : 03-5022 2198