Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Never See U Again




Thanks to a friend’s incessant posting about pan mee, I found myself quite receptive to having it for dinner, despite the fact that I have always said that if you want to eat hawker fare, go to a hawker.  Still, it’s tempting to enjoy a local delight in air conditioning. While it was a bit surprising that a place called See U Village Steamboat served pan mee, I thought I’d give it a chance; in no small way quite taken by the way ‘pan mee’ sounded when spoken by a rather charming, from India server. 

We gave the steamboat a miss, and settled for two variants of pan mee. The traditional, soupy, pan mee and the dry pan mee. The restaurant gives patrons a choice of thin, thick and hand kneaded mee.  I chose the thick for the traditional and the hand kneaded for the dry. We also added on a drink for RM1. 

The ice lemon tea and grass jelly (cincau) were pretty good. The tea was not preprocessed and tasted as if it really was brewed, and had a good dash of lemon squeezed in. The grass jelly was finely grated and the sugar syrup used was fine and lightly scented with pandan. A pretty auspicious start. 

Half an hour in, and despite us being the only other table in the establishment, with the first patrons having eaten and left, our noodles had not arrived. I beckoned Mr-server-with-charming-accent and asked if the food normally took that long. The manager came out and apologized a few minutes later and said that the kitchen mistook the order for a take-away and were redoing the meals. 

Ten minutes later, bringing the wait for a bowl of pan mee to the longest I have ever waited and will ever wait, the dry pan mee was brought forth. My dining partner took pity on me and offered me the accompanying soup. The first spoonful spelt food doom. Thin, insipid soup, with a token four leaves of boxthorn vegetable leaves and a slice of fried bean curd. 

The dry pan mee tasted okay, but my fellow diner likened to the noodle itself to being like eating undercooked fettuccine. Hubba Bubba gum had a softer consistency than this dough! 

When my steaming bowl of traditional pan mee arrived, I hastened to try the chilli sauce. We all know that the chilli can help transcend a pan mee experience. It was so scorchingly hot, with no saving undernote of sweet, nor an overlay of sour or salty. I began to develop tinnitus in my ears from that one taste alone. The hot soup gave no relief. It was a repeat of the same soup which accompanied the dry pan mee. Glorified dish water. The fried bean curd was spat out immediately, as it was still hard and cardboard like. Uncooked.

After lifting the noodles with my chopsticks and developing wrist ache (yes, the dough was that hard and heavy), I decided that it was not worth the calories. Better a heaping portion of tostada chips which go straight to my hips, but leave me with a warm, fuzzy food high, than this sludge. Possibly for the first time in my life, I left my bowl of food untouched and steaming, and called for the bill. 

I was just going to write it off as a NEVER AGAIN, but I decided I needed to speak to the manager. To her credit, she was very polite, and very sorry. Of course, in barely restrained, hunger-fueled irritation, very little satisfies. But I was not looking for satisfaction. I was doing my part to make sure no other hungry diner has to suffer through this. And as I told the lady manager, this was more than a waste of money. It was a waste of food, or raw ingredients, of energy and fossil fuel. It is just wrong on so many counts. 

Again, to her everlasting credit, even though I never brought up recompense, she refunded me the whole amount of my bill -  RMM20.55. 

As I headed home to whiz up the protein shake I should have just drunk in the first place, I thought that if there was anything I’d take from this experience, it would be the manager. I’d love to install her in a good restaurant, with higher than average wages. She kept a cool head, was unintimidated by a patron speaking a language which was not her own first language, and yet she did everything right. Was this lady a relative or even the owner of See U? It would have explained how she could write off the bill. Whatever it was, I go to a place to eat for the food, not the after sales service. Because if the food is good, very little damage control is needed. 

See U Village Steamboat
Paradigm Mall
Lot CF-18 & 30, Level CC
Tel: +603 7887 9954

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