The Pub at Shangri-la Hotel, KL - No Go

Few months back, my godpa passed me a free 3 course meal voucher for 2 at The Pub, Shangri-la Hotel, KL. I saw that the voucher is auctioned at RM150 in eBay! I finally got the time to try it out on monday.

The ambience of The Pub reminded me of the casino in Manchester, where we pretended to be gamblers and sneaked into the casino restaurant for free food. Ashame to admit it, but we used to be some cheapskate Asian students who didn't even bother to give any tips to the waiters after our free meal of steak and lamb! Anyway... back to The Pub. The decor is very 'British', with pool table, the typical red British telephone booth, popcorn machine, TV screening football matches and the wooden panel wall hung with colonial era pictures.

The menu for the 3 course meal wasn't extensive. We only get to choose between 2 starters, 3 mains and only 1 dessert. I settled for mushroom soup (RM27 if ordered separately), grilled beef rib-eye with black pepper sauce (~RM50) and the cake of the day. Chris ordered a mesclun salad, also the rib eye and cake.


The service was very fast. We soon got our bread basket, in which I wasn't impressed with any of the 3 varieties of bread served.
My mushroom soup was quite good, at least it's definitely home-made, not coming straight from the can, while Chris's mesclun salad with balsamic vinegar was just plain boring.

As usual, I ordered my steak blood-dripping rare. Yes, I like my steak still moo-ing. To our disappointment, our rib-eye steaks weren't rare enough. It's kind of tough in fact, you immediately could tell these are not coming from high quality beef. And the black pepper sauce? One word - forgettable.

What made it worse, the sides for the steak were mediocre - very plain-tasting mashed potato and boiled vegetable. I think even the steaks from any small western food corner in food courts would even be comparable to this steak at The Pub. It was a total let-down to be honest. Ohh..have I forgotten? British food is infamous for its blandness. Thanks to The Pub for serving us as reminder! Haha...


Last came the cake, it's chocolate mousse cake drizzled with chocolate fudge. This cake was so ordinary you would think it's a waste of your stomach to even eat it, not worth the calories at all.

So there you go, a RM150 worth of 3 crappy courses for 2. Luckily we didn't have to pay for it. At the end, we only had to fork out RM23 for the frigging fresh orange juice that I ordered at the deal of buy 1 get 1 free.

As we walked out of The Pub, I told Chris that if only my godpa is still around, I would have complained to him that The Pub is such a disgrace to Shangri-la Hotel which is famous for its fine food reputation.