This old town…

It has been exactly one week now since I came back from my weekend trip to Kuching; my missus and I flew back last Sunday morning. My brother-in-law and his family of two sons were staying at the same hotel – the 360 Hotel and they only had two complimentary breakfast vouchers, so I gave mine to them so that the whole family could go together and eat at the Horizon Cafe.

We got to the Kuching International Airport pretty early as we took the 7.15 a.m. shuttle from the hotel. So we decided to go and have breakfast first before checking in. On the arrival level, there are McDs and also Only Mi…but eventually, we decided on this one, another of our very own Malaysian franchises…

I had eaten at one of their outlets in Sungai Petani, Kedah before but I never knew that this was their tagline…

…and they literally took their time.

We chose a table and took our seats but nobody came to take our orders. There was a form on the table for people to tick what they would like to eat or drink but there was neither a pen nor pencil provided. I had to go to the cashier’s counter myself to borrow a pen to tick and hand in our order slip. Our coffee came quite fast…

…but I did not like it at all. It was black but the coffee taste was nothing like the coffee that I would go for back in Sibu. Definitely nothing like STP’s coffee at the Ruby Restaurant in Sibu.

Then we waited…and waited…and waited and finally, our nasi lemak came.

I just could not understand what took them so long considering that nasi lemak is usually precooked and all that they had to do was to put everything together and serve…and there were no other customers at the time.

The sambal was very spicy hot but nowhere as nice as what I can get from the Bandong stall for RM1.50 a packet in the morning. Of course, the rice and the condiments would be much less…but getting two packets would only come up to RM3.00, minus the chicken and poppadums. Anyway, I did not like the chicken…nor the taste of the batter used in frying the meat.

Having said all that, the coffee was RM6.78 for two glasses and the two nasi lemak cost RM17.04. I cannot, for the dear life of me, figure out where all those sen came from. It was probably in the menu but unfortunately, I did not take note of the prices before ordering. Whatever it was, those figures certainly appeared kind of odd. On top of that, I had to pay an additional 5% tax. I thought that the government had waived that following the current economic slowdown? And that’s not all! When I walked over to the cashier’s counter to pay, she was not there…and somebody waiting at the tables shouted, “Tunggu (wait) ah!”

All things considered, it certainly was a disappointment on all counts and I certainly would take my time before I would ever set foot at that place again.