A new CHAPTER

It is part laziness combined with the fact that I have not been to many interesting places lately that resulted in a lull in my posting on this blog. However, a dinner yesterday night changed all that.

Last couple of times during our trips to the Mall of Arabia, we glanced across this place called Chapter that claimed to serve malaysian cuisine along with some boutique bakery stuff. Honestly, it was the boutique stuff that kept us away from this place. But yesterday we were accompanied by our very good malaysian friend and hence it seemed like a safe bet to try and sample the malaysian fare.

The place is chic and looks more english than malaysian to be honest, but it was new and clean with comfortable seating and seemed very welcoming. Once seated we were handed over the menu cards that had a lot of stuff that spelt malaysian with a detailed description of each item. We could see our friend's eyes light up on seeing the menu, which is always a good sign. He asked the servers if they were malaysian. They were not, but they promptly brought out the chef who was and friend and chef started off in malay. After that, there was no looking back.



We left the ordering part to our friend and he explained to the chef that me and wife were vegetarians and they promptly discussed a few nitty gritties and they were done. Our friend explained that he had ordered authentic malay food for us, stuff that you find in every nook and corner in KL.

Then the food began arriving and it was sheer music for our taste buds. The first to arrive was the Rojak Buah Penang. This is a combination of different fruits, cooked in soy sauce and topped with peanuts. Looked exactly as depicted in the menu and tasted divine. Highly recommened.


The pic on the menu
The actual product

The next on the list was Roti Jalan which was accompanied by dal curry instead of the usual chicken curry for us vegetarians. It looked like a work of art and the taste complemented the look completely.


Roti Jalan with Dal curry


This is how you eat the roti jalan:-)
For the mains, wife had the Mee Goreng Pada Kota, in which all the meat, beef and prawns were replaced by more and more veggies. It was a generous portion and the fact that she finished the whole portion proved that she loved it every bit.
Mee Goreng

I had the chinese fried rice with egg in it. It was like any other chinese fried rice. Very good but nothing out of the blue. Our friend decided to have the Char Kway Teow, which apparently is his favorite back home as well. It was malaysian flat noodles with chicken topped with 2 tiger prawns. The smile on his face said it all while he was finishing off the stuff on his plate.


Char Kway Teow

For desert we had crushed ice with some fruits and veggies and jelly, something very similar to the filipino Halo Halo, so popular at Jollybee. The other drink we ordered was the fresh soya with Cincau. Cincau is kind of a jelly ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincau). Now I am not a big fan of Soya milk, so I did not enjoy this much, but my friend who is used to drinking soya milk liked this quite a bit.


All in all it was a fantastci meal. So much so that we now want to venture out to Malaysia to try the different street food on offer there, which we are told is aplently. Till then , we will be happy with visiting Chapter to fill our malay food cravings. The food does not come cheap here and the above meal cost us around SAR 350. A bit on the higher side but worth every penny.

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