Thursday 15 August 2013

Little Taiwan @ e@Curve, Petaling Jaya

Today we decided to try out this chain of restaurants called Little Taiwan which is found in most of the shopping malls. They claim to be Taiwanese food and it holds the Halal status but having visited Taiwan before, I feel that the food here had been altered to suit the Malaysian taste buds. Today we visited the outlet in e@Curve .

Little Taiwan Restaurant at e@Curve

Seats along the mall walkway
The outlet itself is rather small and most of the seats were arranged along the walkway of the mall. This restaurant seemed to be very busy today and there were only two workers serving the entire crowd. There were even many that got disgruntled for waiting close to 30 minutes just for the orders to be taken. Even we had a difficult time here but since we were in no rush, we decided to just accommodate. From where we were sitting, the kitchen was clearly visible and the chefs were two Bangladeshi guys. It is then I learned that no real cooking happens here. The food are all frozen and these guys just need to put them in the microwave, heat them up and serve and I wonder why that was raking really long. The best part is that there were only two microwaves in the kitchen. 

The Menu

The Menu

The Menu

The Menu

The Menu

Specialty Dish here

Another Signature Dish
The menu was quite elaborate and the above are just some of their pages. It took us a while to decide what to have and then I finally decided on having two mains and some other side dishes just to try them out. Once I made the decision, I walked up to the counter and placed my orders instead of having them to come up to my table and that would probably take ages.

Chicken Meatball Soup @ RM 4.90
After an hour of waiting the dishes started arriving one by one. The above Chicken Meatball Soup was the first to arrive. I found this to be rather nice despite looking very simple. There were four meatballs and this dish came at RM 4.90 . The soup was quite nice and had some black pepper in it and the meatballs were nicely prepared too. Though they were slightly on the hard side, the flavouring was good. I would rate this dish at 7/10 .

Dumpling @ RM 6.90
These dumplings were just average to me. The filling was very little and the skin was just too thick and that gave it a very flat taste. For such small pieces, I feel the price of RM 6.90 was too much. I would only rate this at 5/10 .

Braised Egg @ RM 1.50
The Braised Egg was above average. I definitely have had much better ones in other places. The price was not expensive for the dish but I would rate this at 7/10 only . It is nice but not outstanding. 

Golden Yam Balls @ RM 5.90
The above Yam Balls were an utter disappointment. They were really horrible. The crisp skin was tasteless and had a deep oil stench. The filling was rather miserable in quantity. A waste of money. I would only rate this dish at 2/10 .

Side Dish Comes With Any Set Meals


Vegetable is Salad Cream
This side dish comes with any set meals and as we ordered two set meals, we received two of these. The Vegetable came with Salad Cream and was decent though miserable in quantity. I would rate the vegetable at 7/10 .

Rice & Molasses Crisps
The above Rice & Molasses Crisps was just average. We did not quite enjoy this and in fact we left it after just tasting a single piece. I would rate this at only 1/10 .

Braised Tofu
The Braised Tofu was pretty good. They used the same ingredients that was used for the eggs earlier but it tasted quite nice. I would rate this at 7/10 .

White Rice ...part of the set meal

Spicy Salted Fish Fillet Rice Set @ RM 15.90
This was one of the rice sets that we ordered. This came with the above side dish, white rice and also comes with another soup which I would writing more about shortly. At RM 15.90 for the full set, I found it to be quite reasonable. What we did was we ordered two of these sets and shared the mains which makes more sense as we wanted to try as many dishes as possible. The above dish was quite nice and it was surely altered to cater to the Malaysian taste buds. It was slightly spicy but not too much and so it suits well with people having a low tolerance level of spiciness. I would rate the above dish at 8/10 .

Taiwanese Supreme Chicken Rice Set @ RM 15.90
This was by far the best dish that we had here today. It was really nice and the only set back that I can say is that the quantity was less, or much lesser compared to the previous Spicy Salted Fish Fillet dish. To me, this seemed to be like an Indian dish instead of a Taiwanese dish. My rating for this shall be 9/10 .

Clear Soup
This soup came with both the sets. I found this to be rather good. It was slightly salty but delicious. I would rate this soup at 8.5/10 .

Desert Complementary
We got the above desert complementary as they had messed up our orders along the way and we had to wait close to an hour before our food arrived. Well, it was just the same items that they gave us with the main set meals with the exception of the two crab sticks. We just had the vegetables and the crab sticks and left the other crackers as we did not like it in the first place anyway. 

Generally, this restaurant is not bad as they do have some dishes that are nice. The major setback here is their staffing which definitely needs to be improved along with the waiting time for the dishes to arrive. Anyone having a meal in a mall would have limited time and people usually try to catch quick meals like this when they are waiting for showtime to catch a movie and if these people drag the orders this long, definitely most people would not have the patience to wait. One of their waitress was a foreigner, possibly from India, and she made loads of mistakes with us. There was even a point when she put a dish in front of us, something that I had ordered, and as I was about to eat it, she took it away just like that saying that that was not for me but for another table and that mine was still not ready yet. These gestures can really aggravate customers but I just kept my calm today. Otherwise, I think the place is just okay. 

Address: Level 1, e@ Curve, Mutiara Damansara, 47810 Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia.

Opening Hours: 1000 - 2200 Daily

Telephone: +603 7725 1355


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