Padi House

May 2009

You’d have to be an idiot to not make money as a restaurateur in such a prime location as this. However, the packed midweek tables betrayed the mixed offerings of a confusing menu.

I avoided the gentleman offering me the use of a sheesha (Before the meal? Really?) and took my seat upstairs on the balcony. This meant choosing the ‘realism’ of garden furniture and dirty tablecloths over the stylish and contemporary interior setting. It also meant the dulcet tones of Ms Whitney Houston, whose ‘Best Of’ collection was being piped through the Padi House sound system, drowned out by the local house band at the neighbouring Rum Jungle. Throw the delayed covered of Italian Serie A football on the big screen in front of me and the authentic Asian experience I’d hoped for wasn’t shaping up well.

Things got no better with the promise of fish fingers as an appetizer and bland-sounding spaghetti and other pasta dishes on the part Thai, part Malay menu. To start I opted for chicken meat cakes, which apart from being a little oily, were lovely. And the black bean sauce over my main course was near perfect in terms of consistency, however, it suffered from the almost inexcusable lack of chilli or any other element of spice.

It is clear that Padi House has tourists in mind (along with those sheeshas, the gentleman from the start of the evening interrupting my meal twice more to pitch his pipes to me before the night was out). But they would do well to appreciate that tourists don’t come to Malaysia to have their palettes patronised. It’s a superbly situated, well designed restaurant, with some good staff (I appreciate debating test cricket and while that may not be every diner’s dream it certainly satisfied this critic) but it is completely inauthentic. In this part of the world, the food should be the easy bit. You don’t have to be bold or brave if you’re at least ‘keeping it real’ but Padi House seems to have copped out. Not that it will make much of a difference to their takings. Matt Bellotti