For want of better ideas we decided to stop by Phoenix Mills for lunch - Lemon Grass was closed (for good?) and therefore despite our dislike for the Blue Foods chain, we decided to step into noodle bar.
They were promoting their unlimited starters menu - as it was lunch time and we were in no mood for hogging, we decided to order a la carte...we ordered the pepper tofu soup and suimai to start with - while the soup came out immediately, the suimai took over 20 minutes to make an appearance, this in peak lunch hour - i cannot imagine them getting away with such slow service during a weekday lunch hour.
For mains we ordered a shitake fried rice, 'exotic' vegetables in black bean sauce and a portion of make your own noodles where we opted for soba noodles with a whole bunch of veggies.
The rice was good but it could do without the overpowering flavour of too much clove. The EXOTIC veggies contained mainly potatoes - since when have potatoes become exotic, I do not know - must ask Blue Foods!
Service meanwhile became extremely slow, and the waiters behaving typically by choosing to ignore us - they have this instinct of who might want to call them and their footsteps hurry automatically away from that table.
Water refills after being asked for 2-3 times, happened very grudgingly. The noodle bowl finally arrived and sadly it looked like a bowl of Chinese KHICHADI. The soba was overcooked to death and it made a soggy mishmash with some equally done-to-death vegetables, (we had ticked almost 7 from the list and we has to really hunt through the gooey noodle maze to find any). I refused to take any more goop from the staff and asked about the state of the noodles! No prizes for guessing the answer here....staff are trained to answer such questions - "soba noodles always cooks like this only" - I promptly told them that we prepare soba at home and it depends on how much you boil...yeah if the chef decided to take a nap while the noodles are boiling then it does turn out like that.....finally he agreed to replace, but we did not want 30 more minutes of stressful waiting, trying to catch the staff's attention and receiving some more goop in the end.
A meal for 2 without drinks - one starter, one soup, one rice dish and one vegetable came to around 650.....no tips were required where people literally have to SCREAM for attention from the staff!
A word of advice to Blue Foods - Improve or Please Shut Down!
saffrontrail
