In my previous post, I talked about my stay in Subang / Petaling Jaya, which was my first visit to this part of KL. We were there for a wedding dinner and the group of us decided to extend our weekend vacation by moving to KL’s city centre after the wedding. The 4 of us stayed at The Renaissance Hotel, which I would blog about separately.
In KL
The (only) great thing about The Renaissance Hotel was that it had a Healthland outlet at its basement, so N and I had massage twice during our stay!
That being said, the hotel was also near KLCC and Bukit Bintang, which made it a very convenient place to stay.
We spent our first afternoon there looking for an A&W to get our lunch fix… The nearest one was about 1.4km away, so we decided to take a stroll (under the sun) to the outlet which was in an area that we assumed was KL’s Little India equivalent.
To be frank, we wanted to eat at A&W for the sake of eating at one, since Singapore will only welcome our first outlet in X decades next year. Our lunch order was simple: some chicken, hotdogs, root beer and waffle with ice cream.
Our ordering experience was what we described as A&W in Zootopia. The cashier was so slow that she took about 5 minutes to attend to each order in the queue. There were tonnes of other staff walking in and out of the kitchen, but none of them was keen to help her, even though they were essentially just walking about.
As we had to rush back to our hotel for our massage appointment, we literally swallowed all our food; we waited 30 minutes for our food, but took a mere 15 minutes to finish it. That was how slow the service was! (even though it would go down in memory as the most absurdly slow fast food we ever had…)
We had dinner at Petaling Street, at Kim Lian Kee‘s for its famous black Hokkien Mee. Since we had anlarge group, we also ordered stuff like Hor Fun (nice, though oily), Fried Chicken in Black Pepper and Butter Sauce (which tasted like Twisties), Char Siew and Squid in Assam Sauce.
We went to Mango’s Tropical Cafe in Bukit Bintang to chill over games of dart. Compared to the rowdy bars along the street, I very much liked Mango’s for its chill lol
We spent our afternoon before taking off going down to Pavilion to have lunch at Dolly Dim Sum, which was at Level 1 of the Elite section.
Dolly Dim Sum was a Halal dim sum place serving what would make us Singaporeans go all “cheap! cheap!”. We literally ordered a feast only to pay for less than SGD20!
The food and service was decent, especially considering the price. If I were in KL again, I would not mind dropping in to get m dim sum fix!
We then adjourned to Hui Lau Shan at level 6; for those uninitiated (like me), it was a dessert cafe specialising in everything mango. For someone who visited Hui Lau Shan for the first time, I chose a platter that had a small portion of everything…
Each item tried to make a twist to its existing dessert, though I would say the mango sago in itself was superb on its own already! The only good twist / match was with the coconut “ribbons”, where coconut flesh sliced into long strips were added to a mango sago topped with a scoop of mango ice cream.
Yes, it was quite a match!
Getting Out
The vacation ended with a Malaysian Airlines flight out from KLIA.
It turned out, with plenty of time to kill, KLIA was a boring place to be at. We ended up having our dinner at a place called Grandmama’s, which was where I ate at when I was returning from a business trip a few years back.
Of course, being a typical uncle, I ordered the same stuff – Nasi Goreng Istimewara. My last meal was too distant for me to make a comparison, but I felt the meal was underwhelming, as my chicken had more bones than meat and the fried rice was nothing to rave about.
Still, the dish of tri-coloured fried rice was paired with Beef Rendang, Sambal Prawns, Fried Chicken, tomatoes, cucumbers and topped with a sunny side up, which was plentiful for a dish. Kids would love the coloured rice and fried chicken all the same 🙂
The best part was perhaps the Ice Kacang. It was the usual we would find in Singapore, with the addition of salted peanuts, longans and rambutans! I was telling myself the fruits made for the sin of eating such a rich dessert!
Our flight out on MH was a mess.
The security at the gate was a total mess; before us, they were clearing a Malindo Air flight to Kathmandu. Somehow a Kathmandu flight 2 hours later was also scheduled at the same gate, so many people went to clear security even though they were on a different flight. The poor security ended up clearin extra people and having to turn people away, which added on to the waiting time!
That made our security clearance late for commencement (though the plane arrived rather late also). Ground handlers didn’t stop people from bringing oversized hand luggage (not to mention bringing too many pieces onboard), so a lot of time was spent waiting for passengers to fit their many and big luggage in the overhead bins, as well as for latecomers to look for places to squeeze their bags into.
The aircraft was an oven from the start and even when passengers highlighted that to the crew, they just dismissed them by saying that will be corrected shortly. They didn’t, because we knew we were in an oven for over 2 hours (factoring in the taxiing times).
The only plus was that we got to fly on their retro-livery aircraft, retro because it sported a livery of the airline’s early years to commemorate its 40 years of flight!
Oh well, at least my time at KL was well-spent 🙂
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