Reason 1 - I heard the buffet here is one of the best in KL.
Reason 2 - I am meeting up with a friend whom I haven't talked to for quite some time.
Reason 3 - My friend has the Shangri-La member privilege card which entitle the member and his or her guest to 50% discount at any restaurants in the hotel. Well, actually she is not a member, she just borrowed the card from her friend!
Anyway, it proved to be a really enjoyable and mouth watering lunch! I've eaten buffet meals at many hotels and I don't think most of them had the kind of quality and variety of food that Shangri-La offers. But then again, the price was not cheap at RM89.90 nett per person. And I am only talking about lunch. Dinner was priced at around RM120 during Ramadan month! Of course, I only paid RM45 since we got to enjoy the 50% discount.
Here are some of the photos of the food we both ate.
We started off with some Chinese cuisines. There's the lovely duck with plum sauce, fried prawn, fried wantan, chicken and prawn dumplings (har gao). There were other dimsum food like siew mai and pau which I decided to forego as they were not exactly my favourites.
We also tried this herbal chicken soup which was very tasty! I wanted to go for second round but then decided not to as I wanted to leave space in my stomach for other food!
Next, I had this very huge raw oyster which was very fresh. Digging my spoon into the shell was like digging into a bowl of tau foo fah - the meat was smooth and so juicy! If you like oysters, this is the place to go to! Their oysters were very fresh and best of all, they were huge! Not like those small ones you find in other buffet spreads.
Believe it or not, they also had abalones, although they were mini abalones (bottom right of photo). I am not a big fan of abalone, but knowing how expensive abalone is, it would be a waste not to eat it! Anyway, the mini abalones were not really that good, perhaps it was not prepared the way abalones were usually prepared.
There were the usual fresh prawns and clams. But one thing which was missing and which my friend complained was mussels. She preferred mussels to oysters, but not me. Oysters were nicer and tastier, at least to me. I actually ate a few more of those delicious oysters! In fact, if you go to this buffet and just eat all the oysters you can eat, it is already worth your money!
If you notice the 4 bottles in the photo above, and wonder what is inside them, well, they are actually caviar. The black stuff was sturgeon caviar, the reddish was salmon caviar, the green was wasabi caviar (this is the one I liked best!) and the last one was apple caviar, which was not really caviar. Actually I had no idea what it was, but I didn't like it!
There were lots of sushi but I did not bother. Instead I went for the lamb, beef and salmon with asparagus and tomato thrown in. The lamb meat was excellent especially when dipped into the mint sauce!
My friend told me the wild mushroom soup is to die for! So how could I not try it? But after taking a sip, I found it to be ok, certainly not to die for. When my friend took a sip, she realised it was not the same mushroom soup she had before. Too bad!
Next, I went for the satay. Quite good, though the peanut sauce still could not match the one from famous Satay Kajang Haji Samuri. Don't ask me what are those circular objects at the bottom of the photo. All I know is it's chicken meat wrapped in a thin skin of something, which I have no idea whatsoever. They were quite tasty, though.
While my friend went for the western salads, I decided to go for my pasta fix. This one was delicious with lots of clams! Yummy!
After that, it's time for desserts! When I first stepped into Lemon Garden Cafe, I was taken in by their very tall chocolate fountain and could not resist taking a snap of it. Look at how tall it is!
And so, I dipped in some strawberries, grapes, honeydew and marshmallows into the chocolate fondue. Actually, I didn't dip all because I prefer to eat those fruits without the chocolate. The marshmallows and chocolate however were a good mix.
Time passed really fast. The buffet lunch started at 12pm and was supposed to end at 2.30pm. I didn't even realize it was near closing time when one of the staff reminded us that we only have 5 minutes left before last call! My goodness!
However, the staff was very nice. He asked us to take as many food as possible to our table as we could still eat them after closing time. Nice chap...and so we took his advice.
Look at what we took back to our table.
An assortment of cakes and local kueh and we only managed to take half of the different varieties that they have! I liked the kueh talam (green kueh with white layer on top) best! Of course I did not finish them all, I could not take in so much at one go and had to share them with my friend.
Now no buffet can end without a sample of ice cream, right? So besides taking all those cakes and kueh in that last 5 minutes, we had to rush to the ice cream counter to get our ice creams too!
They have six different flavours. I don't remember what the flavours are, because I just asked them to mix it all up and I added in the chocolate chips, pistachio nuts, almond nuts, raisins and other stuffs (don't remember as it was all a rush!)
The result of the mixed up ice cream looks like this.
My friend said it looked like cow dung. Haha! I had to agree especially if it was darker. If I had only used chocolate flavour, it would surely looked exactly like cow dung! But I swear it was delicious. I regretted not putting in more pistachio nuts because that really made it very nice!
This was certainly one of the best lunch I had! Shangri-La really lived up to my expectations. And another thing I like about it is the staffs at the Lemon Garden Cafe. They were so helpful and kind and even joked with us. I would say the service was first rate! I would definitely come back again for more!
Now since my friend did not have to return the Shangri-La member card until next week, guess what? We could come back for another round of buffet! Or should we try other famous but expensive restaurants in this five-star hotel, like Shang Palace and Zipangu?
Well, to know what we did, you will just have to wait for my next post!
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