The first instalment of my “Chef Eats” blog (in which I irritate you by revealing all the great meals a cook can have if he just knows a few other cooks) was supposed to be all positive and full of warm fuzzy feelings for my fellow chefs, but then I went to Dome at KLCC and so:

This is the story of a sandwich that wasn’t. After a vigorous workout at the gym at Maxis, I felt entitled to a nicely constructed sandwich and foolishly headed to Dome at KLCC. It is not as though I had lots of fond memories of great sandwiches there, but it was convenient, not smoked out like Chinoz, and I remembered them doing a halfway decent job, so in I went. I had my laptop with me and some work to do, so I wasn’t in a hurry. The nice girl asked me what I wanted and I ordered a toasted ham and cheese sandwich on whole grain bread. Toasted, if you please, and a coffee to go with that. I worked, I drank my coffee and some twenty minutes later they brought me a grilled vegetable and feta cheese sandwich on foccaccia, untoasted. “Excuse me”, said I when the waiter passed (no idea what happened to my waitress, as I never saw her again),” but this is not what I ordered.” “So you want change your order?” “No, I would just like to get what I actually ordered.” I said quite pleasantly. So after making sure that I wouldn’t rather eat this sandwich right here in front of me, he takes it away. I’m not in a hurry and I’m in the middle of hammering on my poor laptop, so I order fizzy water and carry on quite happily.

Ten minutes later the person that I assume is the manager comes and asks me “So you want to change your order, Sir?” It’s all taking a rather bizarre turn and my endorphin fuelled happy mood is being seriously challenged. “No”, I say again, “I don’t want to change my order; I just want to eat the toasted ham and cheese sandwich I ordered some half hour ago.” “Ah, but you see, this may take a while, because, you see…” I say as nicely as I can: “If instead of standing here talking, you go to the kitchen and tell them to start toasting my sandwich, I’m sure it won’t be more than fifteen minutes, so why don’t you go and do just that??” And off he trots.

I go on working and some twenty minutes later the waiter brings me two slices of cold brown bread with a slice of cold ham and a slice of industrial cheese in no discernible state of meltedness. “Can you call me the manager please”, I say calmly. He arrives. “Can you please explain to me”, I ask, “why it has just taken you twenty minutes to produce a cold sandwich?” “Oh”, he says blithely, “because when you change your order we have to follow the track again, we have to…” Now I am normally as meek as any chef you may know, but at this point I explode and amid a lot of finger pointing, the uncovering of this disgusting piece of inedible evidence to the utter lack of talent of his kitchen I explain to the manager that when you f@$& up your order you go to the kitchen and say: “This idiot out there wants to change his order, can you just quickly slap this one together for me” you do not, repeat, DO NOT fire a new order and let your customer wait almost an hour for a simple sandwich. Breathe, breathe! My mood, by the way wasn’t helped by the fact that I tore the top off the sandwich and flung the ham and cheese to the side of the plate, only to discover a slice of tomato compressed into the thing posing as bread, leaching water into an already flaccid dough.

What had happened, of course, is that whoever took my order, took it wrong and then insisted that they didn’t. I don’t even blame them for that, but what is utterly astounding is that the manager aided and abetted them in their crime against humanity (me) and thus irritated the hell out of a customer. Wrong orders happen. They happen at Frangipani too (not too often, I’m glad to report) and as a manager or a chef, you will never be able to find out whether the waiter took it down wrong, or the customer did in fact think they ordered something else, but you have to realise one thing: It doesn’t matter! What matters is that your customer walks out happy. This is not a fight you as a manager can ever win. It shouldn’t even BE a fight. It’s a mistake! Forget whose mistake it is and give the guy at the table something to eat as fast as you can. If it does take time, give him another coffee, give him a little salad or a cookie or whatever, and just keep the guy happy!

Conclusion? But for the utter incompetence and (dare I say it?) stupidity of the person in charge this simple mistake could have been forgotten within an instant, instead, I have invested another hour venting my frustration in an overlong blog.

Lesson learnt? For a good sandwich, go to Bar Italia.

After 15 years of driving a proton, I bought a real car, so for the first time in almost two decades I’m driving something that is not just entirely utilitarian and you know, the first time I drove it was a moment of revelation. I remembered that driving could be more than just a necessity.  Why didn’t I realise I was actually missing the pleasure of driving for so many years? To be honest, it has been entirely my own fault. I have never bought a second hand car and frankly I’ve been very reluctant to hand over large sums of unjustifiable money to the government just for the privilege of driving a car the value of which drops by 50% the moment you drive it out of the showroom. And so it’s been new protons all the way. Three to be exact, and I must say, I’ve been happy with the first two. They weren’t in any way exciting, but they did the job. The first one I actually sold after four years for more than I had paid for it. Then came the Waja 1.8. The gold colour alone should have warned me off, but no, I stupidly bought it. The engine was produced by Renault and that, I think, is all I need to say about that. Five years of unrequited hope and 20,000 ringgit of repairs later I at last got rid of the lemon.

So I bought a second hand car for the first time in my life and so far I am very happy with it. There were however a few little things to be fixed, so I sent it in for a few days and asked to borrow a car for the period and that’s when it happened. The nice salesman told me I could only be given a “normal” car. Well, after 15 years of Proton, I wasn’t exactly in a position to ask for a convertible Roller and what, after all, could be worse than my last proton? The answer is: A Kia. Spectra to be exact. Now I’m sure there are many good Kias out there (who are we kidding?), but this one was not one of them. The engine worked well enough and as long as the road was fairly flat it actually managed to propel the thing along at a fair clip and if you remembered to slam on the breaks about half a kilometre before you wanted to come to a halt, you were fine.

The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that the previous owner had tinted the window with a film that produced an effect desirable for aging movie stars, but not for following traffic. And then there was the central locking system that was so central you had to lock the car while still sitting in it and then crawl out the window. Fortunately locking it was not necessary, as the probability of it being stolen was less than nil. So here was a car that wouldn’t roll and if it did, wouldn’t stop while at the same time giving you a headache by making your brain think you need glasses. My advice: If anyone gives you a choice between a Kia and a Proton, I think you should seriously consider a bicycle.

You may have read that we recently organised a French cheese evening at Frangipani. What you will not know is that yours truly attended another cheese evening the very next day, only this time it was all Australian cheeses. The selection was small, all from one major producer and all from one region. I am, and this may not come as a surprise, a fervent advocate of unpasteurised French cheeses, but I was trying to keep my cheese chauvinism well under wax papered wrap. My mind was as open as it is ever likely to be (no comments, please), the company was jovial and the wine flowed freely as the four cheeses arrived.

My first bite was of a camembert and was immediately struck by the quality of the thing. The last time I had tried an Australian cheese outside Australia, it had all the right colour and texture, but it was so dull, I could hardly keep my eyes open. This however was entirely different. Okay, it did not have the depth of a cheese made by hand, from unpasteurised milk in the middle of a less than perfectly hygienic farm stable, but it had taste. The stilton, slash rocquefort type thing was equally good. Crumbly, salty, not too sharp, not too mild, with a good amount of greenish mould (so more rocque than stilt) it was really more-ish. Then on to a double brie, or camembert, I couldn’t figure out what it was. Anyway, the difference between Australian camembert and brie isn’t much deeper than the label on the wrapper, but again, it was really good. With a very runny centre and yet much lighter flavour than its French counterparts, it can only be a crowd pleaser.

And yet, through all of this, something kept niggling at the back of my mind, what is it? It took me a while to figure it out, but in the end, I realised that what they lacked was just one thing - Personality. They had all that French cheeses have in the way of texture and even, to a certain degree, taste, but they lacked any kind of personal statement. You couldn’t love them and you couldn’t hate them, and that to me is not a good thing. I want my cheese to unleash the passions,I want my friends to vociferously argue about the merits of their favourite cheeses. If two men (or women) can’t come to blows over cheeses, as they might over football teams, then the cheeses aren’t really worth eating, are they (well, maybe not all women, but surely women wrestlers)? Now, don’t get me wrong, I am sure that there are producers of cheese with great personality in Australia and I know for a fact that French producers of industrial cheese hardly ever deliver anything remotely as tasty as these Aussies (cheeses, I mean), so I am not defending French cheese against Australian cheese,I’m speaking out for the farmers who produce wonderful products and against the big dairies who dress their products up to look like the genuine article.

And if you don’t believe me, you can come and taste these cheeses in our new wine bar when it opens… But that is another story again.

Yes, guys (and that includes gals) it’s another high night at Frangipani Bar. The air is ripe and the milk is slowly decomposing, if one is to believe James Joyce. For those not familiar with his admittedly obscure work, Mr. Joyce called it the corpse of milk. Cheese, I mean. And so we come to the point. Six kilos of delectable have travelled all the way from gay Paris (with a reputation like that one is not surprised the population is dwindling) in the belly of the airship. Nicely wrapped and snugly protected, they arrived in much better shape than I was, squashed into economy between a screaming baby and a farting granny (I kid you not!).

So make yourselves free on Tuesday 10 November from 8 to 11pm at the Frangi bar for Cheese and a few salad leaves. Book and don’t come too late, or you’ll be having nothing but the carcase of the corpse, as it were.