vkeong loves good food, travel and photography!
Damansara Utama
Introducing SixCents – A No Frills, Free Voucher Website
Dec 9th
What if you could get a free beer by showing a printed voucher, or just by flashing it from an iPhone app? For those without an iPhone you don’t have to fret, as the voucher can still be displayed on any mobile phone as long as it supports a browser. What if I tell you this is real and the best thing is the voucher is absolutely free? Yes, free as in zero transaction and no purchase required, which essentially means you got nothing to lose but everything to gain. If I have got your attention then you need to check out SixCents.
But first, I know what you are thinking so let me just clarify that SixCents is not yet-another-group-buying-website. Instead, SixCents is a voucher website aimed at providing exclusive dining experiences for everyone to enjoy minus the unnecessary frills. One perfect example is that you don’t even need to have an account to use SixCents!
Most of the chosen restaurants at SixCents are handpicked by the website owners themselves based on the criteria of quality and service, where some of the prominent ones are like Tom, Dick and Harry’s, Souled Out, 7atenine and Senjyu. Different restaurants have different vouchers. For now, you will find most of them being discount based, buy 1 free 1, and buy five, pay for four kind of vouchers. As time goes by, the number of restaurants and vouchers will grow as well, giving you more choices in future.
Among the list of outlets, I have chosen to try Fat Spoon first, a pork-free cafe at Damansara Uptown that serves Asian and Nyonya influenced food. They are currently running a Jus for Juice promotion exclusive only to SixCents users. After presenting the voucher, you just have to play a game of One Two Jus with the owners (and winning it of course) and a bottle of freshly squeezed orange juice worth RM6.90 will be yours for free. And yeah, there are some terms and conditions that apply but they are so easy to meet they are negligible.
Umai-ya Weekend Japanese Buffet RM46++ (Lunch) @ Damansara Utama
Sep 9th
Umai-ya Japanese Restaurant’s weekend lunch buffet has got to be one of the most affordable around @ RM46++. It is an ala-carte buffet, the kind I prefer because you won’t have to rush for the food and the dishes always arrive fresh.
The choices of food are plenty with quite a number of expensive items. And since any Makimono or Sashimi would probably cost more than RM20, I feel the buffet is much more worthy to try. But of course not all the ala carte items are included in the buffet menu, like for example sea urchin and cod fish. The descriptions of the food will be brief, as most of them are good (unless stated otherwise)
For sashimi alone there are about 5-6 types but the ones I would really recommend are salmon and maguro. Both were fresh and satisfactory for buffet standards and we enjoyed it. Although the butterfish sashimi slices were thick, they had a frozen, refrigerated taste and felt watery inside.
The Sukiyaki‘s portion is huge with generous beef slice, shiitake and tofu. The broth’s seasoning is strong with heavy flavor, which could be mistaken for being salty. And actually you are supposed to dip the Sukiyaki’s ingredients into the raw egg, not pour the raw egg into the pot like we did, lol.
Village Park Nasi Lemak @ Damansara Uptown, PJ
Dec 10th
If you like your nasi lemak with extra ingredients then you gotta give Village Park @ Damansara Uptown a try. Besides plain nasi lemak, they offer various dishes as additional add-ons like ayam goreng rempah, sambal udang, sambal petai and even rendang.
Village Park is very popular and often comes in top for nasi lemak, especially after they had been named as the best nasi lemak by FriedChillies. I don’t know about FriedChillies’ credibility, but it certainly helps in many ways. For me, I came based on the many suggestions I got from friends.
I anticipated Village Park would be very crowded because of their popularity, but didn’t quite expect the crowd to be so huge lol. On an early Sunday morning, the queue for the nasi lemak alone was shockingly long, and there were no seats too despite having tables set up over a span of three shops including the parking space in front.
Sentul Ah Yap Hokkien Mee @ Damansara Utama, FAIL
Jul 9th
This was quite possibly one of my worst dinner experiences ever. As soon as I came back from Taiwan I immediately craved for Nasi Lemak. Many suggestions led me to Village Park at Damansara Utama but too bad it was already closed when we reached there.
So, we decided to give one of the two Hokkien Mee restaurants a try, both located at the same row with Village Park. Both restaurants’ business were equally good too, so good they had their tables stretched to two of their neighboring shop lots. Looking at the huge crowd of customers we thought to ourselves, we must give them a try!
We chose Sentul Ah Yap Hokkien Mee, which had the oldest cook who impressed us with high flames while frying his Hokkien Mee. How wrong we were to think that his experience would be an added advantage. Sometimes, even large number of customers at a restaurant isn’t an indication of good food. It was really a rare and unlucky thing to happen on us that night.
Hokkien Mee @ RM6, ok-ok at best. The HUGE amount of lard didn’t do any good to save the dish. What I had in Kota Kinabalu at a random seafood restaurant was wayyyyy better than this. And the irony is, the seafood restaurant is not specialized in Hokkien Mee at all. Click here to continue reading >
