Chynna in KL Hilton

By Allan Yap & Nigel A. Skelchy

When the relatives on my Mum's side get together, it's always a bundle of laughs. It's a smaller family than my Dad's side but only because there has been attrition. The silver lining in all of this is that the rest of the family has drawn ever closer. And like any good Malaysian family, we congregate over food. Yes, Malaysian! Not Chinese, not Eurasian, not Indian, but Malaysian. The reason I'm so emphatic about all this is because my family is such a polyglot of ethnic intermarriage it would be impossible to classify which original race they were from. My cousin, who invited us to dinner last night, is Muslim and married to a Malay gentleman. I've got cousins on the distaff side who married Brits, cousins and aunties who are mixed indian eurasian. So, I'm not even going to TRY and classify anything. As far as I'm concerned, I'm first and foremost Malaysian and my race is Malaysian.

OK, this entry was actually about food before I got on my high horse! ;-)

So here it is...

Now, I only took photos of the highlights. If I'd taken photos of everything, I'd still be here tomorrow uploading this entry.
The "Loh Mei Kai" was rather pedestrian to say the least. It is tough to make Chinese food like this taste chinese without the obvious ingredient; pork. Dried shrimp only go so far.
This shrimp and dumpling soup was the highlight of the entire lunch. It tasted like a take on "siew loong bao." Except that instead of the soup inside the dumpling, the dumpling was drowned in the soup. Very nice. Lightly sweet, the broth was clear and nicely spiced with the heat and herb flavour of the ginger.
Dessert was quite unique if not rather special. I felt they were trying to be clever for the sake of being clever and not sticking to the one primary rule in cooking. The flavours come first. This was a lemon grass jelly with grapes and a lemon sorbet. Sounds very interesting does it not? The lemon grass flavour though was very very subtle. The lemon sorbet drowned it. Don't get me wrong. It wasn't bad. It was very refreshing. But it still didn't seem like a true dessert. Rather it seemed more like a palate cleanser.

All in all a very positive experience but I happened to glance at the bill; over RM800. *faint*

For that amount of money, it provided a lot of atmosphere but the food itself was rather run of the mill. Nothing particularly special or unique. Fresh food but...