Miraku is a Japanese fine dining restaurant which has recently landed in Paradigm Mall. If you are from Penang and wondering why this sounds so familiar, there’s another one located at G Hotel, Penang too. Miraku, meaning “a great place”, aims to provide the art of Japanese dining for the public, especially those who wish to nourish their inner gourmand.

Featuring a huge selection of dishes, Miraku has several menus to suit everyone’s need: The Grand Menu, Lunch Specials (with reasonable pricing too), Specialty Menu which changes regularly, and Desserts Menu. We were served 3 types of salads. You might have noticed that all of them have the same combination of vegetables, with different toppings. Miraku salad was adorned with Salmon Sashimi “Rose” and Crab sticks, probably the most popular salad for the night. The Ontama Salmon features a soft boiled egg, fried salmon skin, and deep fried noodles, which provided an interesting contrast in texture. Soba salad was pretty mediocre though. All of them came with a variety of dressing to enhance their taste. Well, at least they added to the vegetable quota of the day.What have we got here? Well… there are Tuna, Snapper, Octopus, Salmon Roe, Scallops, Siakap, Red Lion Fish, Salmon, Flat Fish and Mackerel in the mix. What an mouthful! I didn’t get to sample all of them but I was surprised that Raw Snapper and Siakap actually tasted good! I enjoyed the umami Salmon roe, especially the popping sensation. I should also mention that they use grated fresh wasabi, which improve the experience significantly.What a tongue twister trying to pronounce these two dishes, especially the latter. Sounds like some kind of Kungfu Moves, doesn’t it? Kaki (meaning foot in Malay) actually refers to Oysters. Here, we have a cheesy baked version and ones with spicy miso paste. It’s hard to pick which one I liked more, as they were both fabulous in their own ways. The cheese baked oysters were unapologetically rich, a great match with the creamy oyster. The spicy sauce was pretty addictive, complete with umaminess from the soy beans. Nice. Oh, the oysters (came directly from Japan) were unusually massive and juicy. Very well-executed.The seafood feast continued with Deep Fried Flounder. The flounder was cut into pieces, coated with batter and deep fried for maximum crispiness. It was seasoned well, and I should imagine goes well with some beer or sake.The Salt Grilled Mackerel erred on the salty side and wasn’t particularly spectacular, probably because I was unlucky to pick the bitter bit of the flesh. The others fared better though and this was finished in no time.The dragon roll consists of prawns, avocado, seaweed and mayonnaise finished with a huge prawn head as garnish. It’s got the wow-factor for its presentation, and tasted pretty good with distinctive bite of fresh prawns, though I think they could pull back the Mayo a tad as it unfortunately drowned out all the flavours.

The next group of dishes were grouped together for they have one thing in common: they didn’t exactly ticked the right boxes.For RM69.90, the Wagyu beef tataki (unsure of marble score and cut but I wouldn’t put my hopes up too high) was definitely a let-down. The flesh was pretty bland even with the condiments provided and it has a unappetizing chewy texture. I gave up after 2 slices. The Agedashi potato was another strange dish with not much flavour, and the accompanying seawood soup gave the potato a slimy appearance, the contrast between the two was like an arranged marriage with incompatible personalities.

Homemade tofu, although tasted alright, was a bit grainy in texture. Some enjoyed the Dobin Mushi, a soup served in teapot flavoured with some seafood but I felt that they did not cook the broth for long enough to extract any essence from the protein. You might wonder why the Mixed sushi ended up in this collage. It was very standard fare, and for some reason the fish they served was on the chewy side. I nearly choked on a couple of fish bones too. If I were you, I’d just stick to the Sashimi.

Next up came Dessert! Were Desserts the saving grace for the evening?Well, redeemed themselves they did!! I enjoyed the Cheesy Tofu which paired really well with the blueberry sauce. The Wasabi Ice Cream was the most controversial, but the pungency was just balanced with the sweetness, I didn’t mind it at all. Annin Tofu (Almond) fared better than the other Tofu dish, and this one was smooth with a distinctive almond taste.

Along with me there were 13 other bloggers invited to the review. Despite the hits and misses, we had a great time chit-chat-ing away with plenty of belly laughs. Our end of the table was so noisy, I think the roof almost came down. Kudos to Miraku for great hospitality!

This place was recommended by a friend who grew up in Klang. Must be promising, right? It's no ordinary Bak Kut Teh though as this places also serves some 'fusion' dishes including a very appetising looking pork knuckle (from the photo). The interior was definitely cheerful, with white wooden furniture adorned with floral prints. We ordered the Combination Bak Kut Teh (which comes with Pork ribs and Pork Belly) and it arrived in a lovely ceramic bowl. It's weird not seeing BKT in a claypot though I must say. Taste wise, the broth is rich enough with good flavours, though not the best one we've tried. The meat met our expectation in terms of tenderness. I enjoyed the flavourful pork belly, the fat just melts in my mouth. Heavenly. The only problem was that as the place was airconditioned, the soup (and rice) got cold pretty fast, thus dampened the experience. Luckily, we were able to get extra soup to get the temperature back up. I would have prefer some other offals (such as intestines) on the menu too.The dry BKT was just ok. It was a bit one-dimensional, mostly tasted of soy sauce (thus erred on the salty side) with only a bit of sweetness. While the pork belly was tender, the rest of the meat was on the chewy side. The pork belly buns were highly recommended by my friend. Soft pillowy man tau with braised pork belly (BKT flavoured, of course) with some julienned vegetables. I would have preferred slightly more flavour profile from perhaps more vegetables (also to cut through the richness of the pork belly). Not a bad dish.

One thing that really bugged us though, was the service. We were the only customers at 6.30pm. But we still need to actively track down the staff for service (considering we do pay the service tax here, it's only reasonable to expect attentive service, right?). The food also took a little long to arrive which is baffling, surely they would have a large pot of soup and meat ready for serving? Hopefully this is not why the place is empty, and this restaurant does have a potential to be quite popular.

The bill came to just over RM80. Probably a little more than what you would pay at regular BKT but then again you are paying for the ambience, and hopefully a little better service than what we got.

I'm a huge fan of ramen, although I've yet to taste the real thing in Japan. But luckily for us there are several Ramen joints that have come all the way from Japan and Hokkaido Ramen Santouka was one of them.

Locared in Pavilion KL Level 6, this place is always very busy. Though the night we visited we managed to get a table pretty quickly as it was near closing time. After looking through the menu. I've picked a small bowl of Miso Charshu Ramen and some Gyoza.The noodles arrived pretty quickly. The first thing that attracted me was the 3 succulent pieces of Charshu, followed by the thick and creamy looking soup. On first sip though, I've discovered that the broth had so much salt in, it's almost impossible to sip. Though I heard that the Japanese don't actually drink the soup, so they actually do make the broth quite salty. But this much?

Moving on. The noodles were lovely though, thick, bouncy with a bite. I also loved the bamboo shoot. The Charshu unfortunately has the same problem as the broth. And that's not really forgivable. I could only manage 2 pieces before giving up. I felt like I had about a week's worth of salt and my blood pressure was shooting up!

No complaints about the Gyoza though, although it's still slightly on the salty side. Good bit of fillings and the skin was crispy at the bottom.

I've given my feedback to the staff and she said to ask specifically to reduce the salt next time. I'm not sure if there will be a next time. There are other ramen places with better offerings.

Lately Ramen has been all the craze in Klang Valley as quite a few new Ramen joints have popped up. Ikuzo Ramen is amongst them but has begged to differ by serving affordable ramen with no nasty additives. Since we were in the area that evening we decided to dine in this restaurant.

The menu was easy to understand and as expected, they serve a wide variety of ramen with a few side dishes to pick from. We started with some Gyoza.For only RM4.50, these are probably the cheapest decent Gyoza you can get. Delicious pork fillings with cripsy bottom, there's really nothing to fault on. Despite getting the order wrong initially, I eventually received my Tokyo Ramen with thin noodles (I had wanted thick but since my mum was already halfway through her meal I didn't send it back). The soup was sufficiently seasoned and has a rich pork flavour. Noodles were springy enough to last til the end. I enjoyed the tender chashu too. The egg would have been better with even softer yolk though.My mum has ordered the Yakiniku (Beef) Ramen with Kimchi. The soup has more complex flavours. Slightly sweet from the beef and sour from the kimchi, I like it better than mine. The beef was a tad tough though. She had the thick noodles which I prefer, though towards the end there were some congealed pieces.

In general the service was quite attentive. I would return to try the Hokkaido Ramen and more gyoza!

I've always thought of W.I.P as more of a drinking joint rather than restaurant, and I've always heard about how good the mojitos there are. Turns out I could not be more wrong as they do have a huge menu with a good mix of local food as well as western varieties. So one fine Sunday afternoon we went there for drinks as well as lunch and I was pleasantly surprised. Salmon Tomato Bruschetta
Sliced marinated salmon and tomato on crusty baguette

Quite decent bruschetta with good flavours. I like how they are quite generous with the salmon, but not enough tomatoes though, I feel. WIP Fritto Misto
Brinjal, lotus root and lady fingers thinly sliced, seasoned and deep fried, served with spiced mayonnaise

All my favourite vegetables made even better deep fried. No complaints about this. The spiced mayonnaise complements the vegetables wellChicken Vindaloo
Marinated chicken breast cooked in hot and spicy gravy, served with chana masala, aloo methi, salad, papadum, briyani rice

Wow this dish definitely packs a lot of heat even for a chili lover like me. The briyani rice was fragrant and comforting. The chicken was quite tender, and the spicy curry has good flavours (although hard to taste with that amount of spice), I love the sourish chana masala (chickpeas) and the aloo methi (potato fenugreek stir fry) to balance the heat. The portion is rather large for me though, I couldn't finish the curry at all and felt bad wasting food.

And yes the cocktails were excellent, even the non-alcoholic ones. The service was very attentive, I suppose for the price we pay we would expect nothing less.