anti-po service

i left the house today looking forward to breakfast, and some quiet time to write. there is a new cafe in bangsar that i have been to 4 times over two week-ends. the place is run by two expats, and have brought a non-malaysian coffee culture to my adopted haunt. i have been very happy with the new menu, the flexibility of the owners and the culture they are bringing to a location that is feeling more dated by the week. too bad all the good may not last.

antipodean sits next to the aging la bodega in telawi. even the name is a hint to the background of the owners, two kiwis who are attempting to bring a new cultural spin to a poorly copied food and beverage scene in KL. a cafe that roasts its own coffee daily and can correctly make a ristretto was not uncommon in the US of 20 years ago, but is long long over due here. well trained and energetic staff, with owners who seem to always be close by help make this a stand out new location for those who grudgingly accept poor service as the norm.

the menu is a nice mix of all day breakfast items that go far beyond the "english breakfast" norm and light cafe fare designed with a playful sense of balanced fusion. the food is simple, but sports freshness and quality of ingredients that stands apart. it is also presented with a sense of style that reminds one why nouvelle cuisine works at all levels, even in the cafe.

the two best things about the place have been the fact that they are non-halal, meaning i can have pork with my banana pancakes, and that they are flexible and focused on customer service. last week i asked one of the owners if they could make me a breakfast sandwich on croissant. to do this, they needed to take one of the menu items and convert the eggs from scrambled to "over easy". this would let me pick the croissant up and eat it the way my mother used to make.

the breakfast sandwich was one of longest lived craving items from the time when i first came here. mcdonalds has pseudo-mcmuffins, but the chicken sausage takes any enjoyment of breakfast away, so i have long ago stopped looking for a sandwich during breakfast. when the owner said, "sure, no problem, we can do that" and sent it over, i was in heaven. i knew i had found a new place to call home.

this morning i tried to replicate the experience. a few minutes after ordering the other owner came over and said, "i have some good news, and some bad news". which was a polite way of saying he had bad news. the kitchen, as he explained, was not able to cook an egg any way other than scrambled without falling into chaos. yesterday, people had come in and asked for eggs other ways but hard boiled had come out soft, soft boiled had come out wrong. rather than helping me enjoy home, i was back into the standard malaysian environment of "the good news is we do it one way, even if it isn't the way you want it".

i said okay, finished my tea, and packed to leave. i moved over into bodega after i decided that if i was going to be disappointed by food options i might as well have better music. some how, moving to a place that never offered to be different or to provide great customer service seemed better than having it offered and then taken away.

antipodeans are the people who live on the opposite side of the world. only 4% of the worlds land mass has an antipode. new zealand and malaysia are both those that do, but it is uncommon. this cafe opened with the promise of being equally uncommon, having quality, creativity and service. sliding into a lowered customer service because staff is not capable of cooking an egg other way than a single way, is the slippery slope to be as mediocre as the competitors.

go and have a coffee, try the orange/lime soda or the very good french toast. talk to the barrista or the owners and get to know why small coffee shops are a welcome change from the corporate caffeine giants. support these guys and hope that the trend of better quality F&B continues the recent trend in KL. but when you go, do me a favor, ask them to be flexible and teach their staff to make an egg more than one way.

the world should not always be scrambled, trust me and try it "over easy".

chicken sausage

i have been challenged on the question of breakfast here more than once. why does it matter that breakfast has pork on the table? why do i whine as much about it as i do? i was considering how my day in the US and here are different, and basically it came down to the levels of pork and of quality. that last word was almost ease, but my issues here are not about having things, its having things done well.

in the US i can go into a restaurant and ask for a burger without a bun, the same burger but wrapped in a piece of lettuce. that really might sound like a simple request but without even trying i am sure the level of effort to get this done is not worth the return. last week i ordered two hard boiled eggs, with a side of hollandaise. the eggs came in 5 minutes, two eggs in the shell sitting in a bowl with no sauce on the side. as i cracked the first egg it exploded in my hand, hot runny yoke spilling over my burnt fingers.

i sent the eggs back, asked again for hard boiled out of the shell and for the sauce on the side. 5 minutes later, a new bowl with apparently new eggs, running together is a mass of soft boiled ooze. i asked the server how i should correctly order hard boiled eggs, he smiled and walked away. a few minutes later i asked another server for hollandaise and ate the soft boiled eggs. i wondered if the lesson was to not try to do things the hard way.

a few months ago i was trying to order breakfast and was given the choice of chicken sausage, beef bacon or nothing. i choose to skip the meat, but only after asking those around me if they would like pork also. the people at the tables close by agreed that they also wanted the other white meat; majority-discrimination or not, it just tastes better. i added a sign to my table that read, "beri saya babi", which was politely ignored.

in the US, having breakfast is simple. it comes without a moral debate over the animals i am eating, or a secular debate over why others are choosing which they will allow in slab or sausage form. i have tried the local replacement meats, but find them sadly lacking. i am sure if i asked my grandmother why she didn't serve beef bacon or chicken sausage, she would have looked at me in a puzzled way and said, "because that's not the way god made them".

that same puzzled look is the one i get when the debate of breakfast meat breaks open. but here is the thing, i have tried it their way, i have eaten the weak alternatives, and i have gone without. have they tried it my way? do the people who think chicken sausage is a good choice know the the taste of the meat allegedly evil? i challenge anyone to tell me beef bacon tastes as good as pork; or is even a close alternative.

by the way, baked beans are not for breakfast either. copying your cuisine from the british is a recipe for failure in taste, but even local "english breakfast" is done with compromise. the best part of baked beans is the flavoring of salt pork. the local version is correctly halal, and again suffers in terms of flavor. post-enlightenment democracy is about allowing people to choose without the enforcement of mystical tradition pressuring the way. at the very least its about letting quality come to the front over tradition.

take a taste before you want to tell someone what is best. or listen to my grandmother, let others do breakfast, "the way god intended".

toppatha muffin

i was watching sea-angel eat a muffin this morning, it was wrapped in a tall sheaf of paper and was presented as one cone like shape. the comment was that the muffin was strange, the fact that it was pink was enough for me to know that, but it was the taste and shape that caused the comment. it made me think of the top-of-the-muffin episode from sienfeld, part of which was the hint that taking the top of the muffin, the part most agree is the best, and leaving the bottom is a sign of upper-class greed and veblenish conspicuous consumption.

i have recently made a change in my morning habits. i have stopped stopping for a pancake and a series of chawan kecil and have replaced that with a faster stop for bungkhus caffeine in the malaysianized-seattle style. along with my americano i have found a banana chocolate chip muffin is the perferred source for morning calories and taste. but i have also found that much like the second round of espresso at the bar, the bottom of the muffin is just too much.

i love this muffin, it's better than the muffins starbucks has in the US. those are overly sweet or sadly low in fat and taste. starbucks here is also sadly halal. this is strange to me given the clientele in my sbux who are almost exclusively chinese and expat. the store i am going to is one of the first sbux in the country and has a small but loyal following. i have tried to argue the logic of catering to the market and providing something in some locations that will make the customers you have happy, while not impacting those you don't have. maybe i need to do some market surveys to prove the point, someone needs to lead this charge.

the muffins are good, but just too much. i don't want them smaller, but i have not figured out what do to with the bottoms on the days that enjoyment is second to calorie control. i was reviewing a document with someone, and offered the bottom of the muffin. as a gentlemen, i could have offered the top, but i did not expect acceptance of the offer, and the top is honestly why i purchased the muffin. there was acceptance, with a questioned look of "just the bottom?" she then proceeded to finish the bottom with a gusto and clear appreciation for the sweetness.

so this is the question i have been going over in my head? is it better to offer to share the bottom of the muffin or to suppress the pains and keep the bag closed until you are past the difficult point of sharing what might not be seen as a genuine offer. my grand mother would have said that i should have offered to top of the muffin and eaten the bottom. i could have, but the thought of passing on the top and taking the bottom would be all the more painful if the top was then brushed off. offering to share comes with the triple risk of acceptance, displeasure or rejection. we are taught that acceptance of an offer is a good thing, but when the top of the muffin is involved, do you really think that is the case?

the odd taste and shape of the pink muffin is clearly that there is no depth of muffin culture in the country. a few malay-ified chains are bringing muffins in, but the roots of this penetration are not deep enough for people to know the difference between good and bad. the choke hold of paper wrapper had done the ultimate harm of making the entire muffin into the less prised "bottom-of-the-muffin". the bakery has come up with a way to counter the culture of gastronomic greed that comes from focusing on tops which have naturally exploded out of the pan and cooked with wider exposure to the ovens heat. these higher demands produce the better quality of the exceptional tops.

the cramped version we saw was sadly malaysian. kept encased in paper, hidden from the heat, not allowed to expand and grow beyond the restrictive wrapper. no one in an open and honest environment would actually want a bottom only of the muffin, and here we have the clear example where rather than having the exceptional allowed to show itself, all are being kept in the lowest common denominator restricted space.

if you won't help me get starbucks to carry a breakfast sandwich not built on chicken hotdogs, please help me with this. let people know that malaysians will not except bottom of the muffins only. help create a culture where its acceptable to have tops and bottoms.

if you help, i will listen to my nana and be more open with my muffin. i won't just offer the bottom, it will be the fair (or at least game theory based) "i split, you pick", or even the other way around. team work is needed when dividing the top of the muffin.