The Kuala Lumpur Diaries #6 – Where We Ate

The Kuala Lumpur Diaries #6 – Where We Ate

Now I’ve covered everything we did whilst in Kuala Lumpur, a jam packed 2 days – I thought I would mention in a bit more detail about places that we ate, I thought I’d do this to try and make the other posts a little bit shorter as they were already long enough without!

You’ll notice that there’s no breakfast places listed here, we ate in our hotel (Shangri-La, Kuala Lumpur) as breakfast was included, and it was absolutely lovely.


Din Tai Fung
Located: Pavillion Shopping Centre // Time Visited: Tuesday Evening

After getting to our hotel at around 7pm, by the time we had gotten to our room, unpacked a little and freshened up we weren’t heading out of the hotel until around 8.30pm. Ben suggested we headed over to the Pavillion Shopping centre, and we decided to grab something to eat here after a little wander (and a few wrong turns). After a look around the food court and seeing a lot of western options I declared I wanted the most asian looking menu we could find. We found Din Tai Fung and walked right in, finding out later that it’s ranked as one of the top ‘cheap eats’ in the city on Trip Advisor and deservedly so.

This is a small national chain of restaurants which I think appear to be independently owned. We were warned on arrival, just before 9.30 that they were shutting soon and needed to order, so we were rushed a long a little to choose, and it being end of service meant that some of our picks were already sold out. This however wasn’t an option as the menu was plentiful. Service was fast, which was good as I’d not really eaten on the plane thanks to the crappy menu (Ben was well stocked from eating both mine and his meals!).

Cuisine was a mix of different asian influences, it seems like most of Malaysia is influenced heavily by China, India and Thailand. We opted for noodles, dim-sum, sweet and sour and some spring rolls, to name but a few. All together we had 6 dishes and 2 drinks and thought the food was reasonable, and it was one of the nicest meals that we had!

Cost of Meal: 133RM (£24)


Rani Vilas Restaurant
Located: Outside Batu Caves // Time Visited: Wednesday Lunchtime

A lot of the eateries around Rani Vilas looked a little… grotty rustic from the outside, and any that we had opted for would have probably been relatively similar but we decided to on the opinion of our guidebook which recommended Rani Vilas, a vegetarian restaurant as a good option.

The service here admittedly wasn’t the best, after finding the menu a bit confusing and trying to ask whether we had ordered enough food we really wasn’t sure. We opted for a Banana Leaf, which was a mixture of vegetable curries and crackers served on top of a banana leaf (this was 10RM, but there was an all you can eat option for 12), We also got a portion of noodles on the side (which were huge, enough for 3 or 4 people to share easily!), as well as two bottles of cokes. We probably could have had an extra serving of the Banana leaf (as it was lovely) but we did have enough food between us.

Cost of Meal: 28RM (£5.05)


BBQ Nights
Located: Menara Rohas PureCircle // Time Visited: Wednesday Evening

After walking up and down the street disagreeing about where to eat we eventually settled on BBQ nights after seeing that it was quite busy with locals, always a good sign I think. Service here was nice and friendly and we opted for a sharing mixed grill between us, a naan bread each (peshwari for life), and they gave a complimentary rise. They swapped out the fish for chicken on the mixed grill happily, as neither of us eat fish. Served on sizzling hot plates this place was really lovely, whilst not being anything dressy. In addition to our food we also had 4 drinks, and thought the price of this was again very reasonable.

Cost of Meal: 107RM (£19.30)


Gin Ger
Located: Central Market // Time Visited: Thursday Lunchtime

This was a great little find in Central Market, we opted here as it looked the most comfortable of seating options out of the limited options in the Market and we had a long day of morning before hand. This was a thai restaurant and after seeing/smelling food come out we went a bit overboard with our ordering here – whilst we only ordered 4 portions the sizes were generous. We had Spring rolls (which were so deliciously fresh), Pineapple Rice with Pineapple Chicken (which came with a free Noodle Salad), Coconut Butter Chicken (mouthwateringly good, beautiful buttery sauce with crispy chicken on the inside), with a vegetarian noodles which we definitely didn’t need.

Coconut Butter Chicken

Beer here was affordable (15RM) which made a change as quite often it was pricey, the ice teas were very ‘tea-y’ and I wasn’t the biggest fan. Between us ordering a beer, 2 ice teas and a coke. The restaurant itself was quite lovely with shutters opening onto the upper floor of the market.

Cost of Meal: 125RM (inc 10% service charge) (£22.50)


Birds & Blues / Guitar String Cafe
Located: Pavillion Shopping Centre // Time Visited: Thursday Evening

After failing to find a place to eat at Lot 10 (you can read about that here), we stopped for a different type of cuisine, as I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to get bored of Asian food midway through, and wanted to keep breaking it up with other meals.  Birds and Blues and Guitar Strings Cafe were two restaurants separated by a pathway but somehow shared a menu, we ate in Guitar String Cafe, but had we of known that we probably would have opted for the american car style booths in Birds and Blues.

Guitar String’s tables were on wheels and had a little bit of a mind of their own. Whilst the reel on the television behind Bens head was an odd repeat of downloaded youtube music videos, Britain’s Got Talent Videos and teenagers at a dance competition every 20 minutes or so, which started to get a bit annoying! They didn’t serve alcohol at these restaurants, which was a shame as we both were in need of a beer. We opted for a sharing starter of things like wedges, goujons and onion rings, before both having a T-Bone Steak for our mains. Service wasn’t particularly attentive despite the fact the restaurant was pretty much empty.

Price of this was a little expensive for what it was in comparison to other places, whilst we did have steak which tasted nice it was also a little fatty, out of all the places we ate, I would say skip this one – it wasn’t horrible to say avoid,  but I wouldn’t go back either.

Cost of Meal: 218RM (not inc service charge) (£39.90)


So that’s it, I’ve got my final roundup of my thoughts about Kuala Lumpur coming up in the next day or two! If you want to see what we got up to in Kuala Lumpur and where we stayed you can click here to see the Kuala Lumpur Diaries in full!

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Helpless Whilst Drying

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4 Comments

  1. serenbird
    July 16, 2017 / 10:05 pm

    The food looks sooo delicious! I am glad you found some nice restaurant! I can wait to read more about your trip xx

  2. July 26, 2017 / 12:44 am

    Wow the prices are SO CHEAP! I’d eaten so much just to max out the value LOL 😆
    What about snacks? Any ice cream or other goodies?
    Did you do research on restaurants before you went? We try to do some whenever we travel but it’s often tricky with places where English isn’t the primary language. In Japan we just winged it and lucked out.
    Looks like you got a good sampling of their food.

    • July 26, 2017 / 9:13 am

      We did eat way too much – we came back collectively just short of 2 stone heavier! Whoops ha!
      No we didn’t I researched foods and dishes so I’d be able to make some kind of judgement call on menus if there was no English, but we generally just had an area we wanted to head to in the evenings and either researched places before we went or just winged it when we got there!

    • July 26, 2017 / 9:16 am

      Also didn’t really snack that much – we’d usually grab a drink to take back to the hotel and an ice cream in the evening from 7 eleven- I couldn’t remember the specific prices of them, but I’d say most things converted to about 80p-£1. Drinks were a bit like chocolates, twists on western brands that we don’t get (at least here in the UK), and the Ice Creams were things like Magnums, nothing out of the ordinary (apart from white almond which we don’t get here!)

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