Pink Elle Reviews…

I had a dinner date with a friend last night. We were both craving something meaty and unhealthy like thick cut fries! She wanted a steak sandwich and I wanted a ham steak and we couldn’t for our lives decide where we wanted to go! She told me about this nice little German restaurant in Mount Kiara so we headed there only to find it closed! In the end, we opted for Finnegans in Desa Sri Hartamas.

Finnegans prides itself as being one of the Malaysia’s leading Irish pubs and the place is all done up in wood and hardly lit, a little like the dark, musty pubs you find overseas. Perhaps it was a week night but I found the place shockingly empty. Just one table and 2 guys nursing drinks at the bar. It looked a little run-down and could have definitely done with a bit of makeover. The chair I sat on was rickety and I was constantly terrified during dinner that it might just give way under me!

They have lots of porky stuff on their menu which suited what we had in mind and suddenly I wasn’t craving my ham steak anymore. So we both ordered a braised pork knuckle and a basket of fries to share. Waited for about 40 odd minutes and this appeared!

My friend and I stared at each other, totally aghast! That was no pork knuckle! What happened to the bone and the knuckle?! All it had were some slices of meat that looked suspiciously like odds and ends thrown together, all for RM30! And the meat was tough on top of that which pork knuckle shouldn’t be at all! We tried eating it but got really upset so we called the waiter over and they kept insisting that it was pork knuckle which they’ve sliced off the bone. The cook later came out and confirmed that it was, indeed, pork knuckle. I guess we had no choice but to accept their explanation and grudgingly tried to eat it.

A while later, the cook reappeared and she offered to take it back and replace it with a pork ribs instead. I thought that was really nice of her and she appeared again soon after with a nicely plated plate of ribs that were really tender and delicious.

That’s what we call service! They only charged us for the knuckle and was quite nice about the whole incident. I didn’t think too much of the food but the service and the lengths they went through to make us happy was quite exemplary. One surprising thing I noticed too was that the waiter who cleared our plates was Malay and the cook who spoke to us earlier looked very Malay as well. The waiter used a piece of tissue paper to clear our plates as he said he couldn’t touch them but I was just really amazed that a place serving pork had Malay servers. I guess when people are open-minded, there are always opportunities everywhere.

After that heavy porky dinner with fries (Oh no!), topped with the nasi lemak I had indulged in for breakfast, I went to bed feeling very guilty indeed! Something tells me I’ll be needing a diet patch soon!