He told me he had booked the entire restaurant for me. I simply snorted at him.
Of course, it certainly felt like that. The entire restaurant was empty that Sunday afternoon, and all eyes were on us. I felt like digging my nose just to see their reaction.
The latest baby in town, Cafe WIP, brainchild of Fred and Michelle (owners of Souled Out), was our chosen lunch destination. This is what they said on their flyers: “Stripped walls, a hodge podge of chairs and tables and PCK look-alikes? No, we are not a hardware shop nor are we an interior design depot. We are a restaurant and bar that serves some pretty mean food and drinks.” (blah blah blah) Stripped walls? I agree. Hodge podge of chairs and tables? I’ll let you decide. To me, quite a lot of their furniture matched. I mean, they were typical dining chairs and tables. PCK look-alikes? They’re a lot cleaner and well-ironed than I expected. And all of them wore the same coloured overalls, almost as if they were out of a children’s show. Service was excellent. If it were any less than that, I’d have thrown a fit. (Remember, we were the ONLY customers)
WIP is supposed to be a transitionary thing. A temporary endeavour to draw feedback, comments and criticisms to enable the owners to take stock of what the customer wants before “birthing” their new pride and joy. It’s certainly interesting, wanting to know what the customer wants and all that, but it seems like a rather expensive experiment for such successful entrepreneurs. I’m extremely curious what their next baby will turn out to be.
They were having an oysters promotion at only RM24 nett for half a dozen oysters, or RM40 for the oysters and a pint and a half of Guinness. No prizes for guessing which one Bald Eagle went for.
Looking at the menu, we felt that we were transported back to Souled Out but without the crowd. I’m surprised that for an experiment such as this, they’d resort to using a tried and tested menu. The menu consisted of Western, Asian and North Indian offerings.
He had the Cordon Bleu Chicken (RM24), essentially deep fried boneless whole leg wrapped around a sausage, cheese and chicken ham. A mushroom sauce dressed the dish. It’s interesting that chicken breast wasn’t used for this dish, but I’m all for a boneless leg as the meat is less stringy.
I was in the mood for a non-spicy Indian dish (you didn’t know there was one, did you?) and the Chicken Makanwala was a perfect choice. This is boneless chicken cooked in a tangy butter sauce. I’m glad that there was a liberal serving of this sauce which I mopped up with the fluffy naan bread provided on the side. The dish also came with green peas and mushroom masala, raitha, a salad and papadum. All for RM25.
We wanted dessert, but the only item available was the Volcano (RM19), presumably named because of the way the Haagen Dazs vanilla ice cream is plopped on top of the moist chocolate cake in praline sauce with cashew nuts. It was not quite a Krakatoa though. I felt cheated for having to spend RM19 on this tiny dessert that didn’t quite do anything explosive to my palate. Yes, it was nice, but two mouthfuls and I was done.
Cafe WIP
Lot G111, Ground Floor, Bangsar Shopping Centre,
285, Jalan Maarof, Bukit Bandaraya,
59000 Kuala Lumpur.
Tel: 03-2094 1789/2789
Operational Hours: Daily from 12 noon till “closing” (don’t ask me what that means)
