Penang
– Restaurant reviews
by
Here's some information about the restaurants we've eaten at during various visits to Georgetown since 2004.
See our reviews for:
Bayview Hotel
Farquhar Street
"As you'd expect, the Bayview has a number of eating and drinking establishments, ranging from a nightclub in the cellar to a revolving restaurant on the top floor! We checked most of them out during our stay..."
Read on...
Ecco
Lebuh Chulia
"We sat down and looked at the menu. It was short, but laid emphasis on natural, freshly-prepared ingredients and hand-made pasta and pizza dough. This sounded encouraging. After a friendly chat with the waiter, we suddenly realised that time was marching on and it was only 25 minutes until their closing time! So we ordered, and prepared ourselves for a wait – which in the end wasn't very long at all."
Read on...
Farquhar's Bar
Eastern & Oriental Hotel
"Just as a visit to Singapore is not complete without a Singapore Sling in Raffles, we felt that we must have a sling or a punch at the E&O. Expecting it to be prohibitively expensive, we planned only to stay for one drink before moving on to somewhere more affordable. Surprisingly, we discovered that because of Happy Hour (which lasts from 5pm till closing!) the bar at the E&O was considerably cheaper than the so-called British bar called Soho, which we'd visited the previous evening."
Read on...
1885 afternoon tea
Eastern & Oriental Hotel
"Tea arrived and was poured – and looked woefully weak. Kay commented on this, but the waiter didn't seem to notice and carried on pouring anyway. As soon as he'd gone we lifted our teapot lids and poured the tea back in, noticing as we did so that the 'tea' was actually tea bags."
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Sheraton Hotel
– dinner buffet
"It just goes to show how limited our choice was of nice little local eateries that we'd end up having the buffet at the Sheraton. On the face of it, the choice looked good enough for us to decide to stay. On closer inspection, there were so many things worryingly wrong that I even took the time to write a whole page of faults and subsequently discuss them with the duty manager."
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Sushi King
KOMTAR
"This is one of the Malaysian chain of Japanese fast food restaurants. It has a fairly limited à la carte menu but an extensive selection of small plates of food coming round on the conveyor belt. You sit at the sushi bar and help yourself to these plates, which are colour-coded according to their price. Most of it is very inexpensive anyway, with the most expensive dishes being RM6 (less than £1)."
Read on...
A few more notes and comments:
The Soho Bar gets a mention in our review of Farquhar's Bar at the E&O. This bar is situated in Jalan Penang and bills itself as George Town's best British pub. Well, it's not in the least British. The night we were there it was packed to the gunwales with Malaysians listening to music at ear-drum shattering volume. Urghh! Never again. Maybe it's just that I'm too old, so if LOUD music is your thing, the Soho Pub is definitely the place for you in George Town.
We visited the pub 20 Leith Street, which is opposite Cheong Fatt Tze's mansion in Lebuh Leith, and found the staff friendly and helpful and the beer not too expensive. It certainly is an interesting building but nothing to write home about really. The downside of this place is that it only has squatter toilets (not great for the balancing act after a few beers). The food wasn't great either; I ordered a "toasted cheese sandwich" which was a bit of a misnomer. The thin white bread was toasted on one side only and inside was a small slice of Kraft cheese (not melted) and great slabs of sliced tomato. Not very nice at all. But the main reason we don't plan to return was because, due to the airconditioning being cranked up so much, it was like sitting in a fridge. When we mentioned the cold to one of the staff, she suggested that we bought one of the long sleeved T-shirts on sale at the bar. No thank you, and never again!
