Never been to Spain…

No, I’ve never been to Spain. Neither have I tried anything from their cuisine either. The closest I ever got to that were the chicken croquettas that used to be available here when this guy that used to be a tapas chef in Singapore and on some cruise liner was around. That was why when we were here for breakfast not too long ago and I saw that they had paella on their dinner menu, I told my girl that we would be back to give that a try.

The girl who came to take our orders could not speak any English and I was not in the mood to struggle with my limited Mandarin so I asked for one who could. After all, this is a classy WESTERN restaurant, isn’t it? Another one came and she was no better but thankfully, a third one followed suit and yes, she was conversant in the language and well-versed with the items on the menu so we were able to tell her what we wanted and promptly placed our orders. I guess the likes of those would go down well with the general public and most of the customers here – they probably would prefer that being more comfortable with it but I, for one, would not know what things like paella or tapas, for instance, are called in that lingo. As far as I know, spaghetti is “Italy mien” (Italian noodles) and from the adverts on radio during those days when our own local Sarawak fast food franchise first made the scene, I learnt that hamburger is “ham pa pao” but adding one and one equals two, I can get along quite well now with the little that I know just that it will take a little bit of effort on my part.

We had their cream of pumpkin soup (RM6.25, inclusive of GST)…

…which was very nice. We could be wrong but we thought we tasted something a bit like santan (coconut milk) in it. However, it was a little watery so in comparison, my girl prefers the ones her mum makes – thick, rich and creamy.

The tod mum pla (RM7.31, inclusive of GST)…

– their Thai-style fish/seafood cakes, categorised in their menu under the tapas section, were very good and went absolutely well with the light fish sauce and cili padi dip that came with it.

We enjoyed their flower clam aglio olio pasta (RM14.73)…

…very much too but there was hardly anything in those clams, very very small and in some, there was nothing at all plus we had to be careful with some broken bits of the shell in the pasta. I think we would like their pasta of curry seafood (RM11.90) that they had on their previous menu more…or the seafood pasta here but of course, the latter is a lot more expensive.

The crispy pork belly with sweet potato wedges (RM20.03, inclusive of GST)…

…was superb. It tasted so nice that it literally swept us off our feet and we certainly loved that very much but we had one bone to pick with the dish – there was nothing crispy about it. In fact, when I saw the item on the menu, I imagined something like our siew yoke (roast pork) with the crispy skin or what they call crackle or crackling. But other than the kind-of-misleading name, I would say it has a slight edge over the ribs that we like a lot here and is cheaper too, though comparatively, this one is a little smaller…

Still, it was big enough to be shared by two, or even the three of us.

Iced water was FOC and the total for that delightful dinner that we had came up to only RM48.30.

Now, wait a minute! Whatever happened to the paella that we had gone all the way to try? Sadly, we were duly informed that they had run out of the special rice that they would use to cook the dish so it was currently unavailable. Well, it did not really matter all that much, considering that we did enjoy what we had…so I just told the guy (who said that he had worked for two months under a Spanish chef) to post on Facebook once the new stock of the rice had arrived and we would make our way there again…just for the paella!