Tupai Tupai - KL

This restaurant's been around for several years and the food has been consistently good. Most of the gang was in the office today (plus extras) so, made a quick call to dash over there for lunch. The roads were pretty good today too due to lots of people taking the week off.

Location : Near Dewan Bahasa, towards the Palace.

Can make it within an hour ? (travel + service) : Yeah, if the road's not too busy. Service depends on how many people's at the queue.

Decor/Ambience : Cool... literally. The restaurants motto is 'Suasana Rimba... di Kuala Lumpur'. And it works too. The restaurant has no walls and built from wood with very high ceilings. The fan and watered roof keeps the whole place very cool and breezy. You wouldn't think you're in KL. Interesting fact: all the beams used to construct the restaurant came from old TNB power poles. Talk about re-cycling !

Food : Oh man, where do I start.... you can order Chinese food if you like (which I have been told was darn respectable), but the main attraction is the spread of Malay dishes. They have all the gulais and masak lemaks and currys and asam pedases etc. There's also ikan bakar of various kinds, and daging bakar as well. And typical of a good Malay restaurant, you get lots of ulam and sambal and tempoyak and cencalok and even budu ! I had the pucuk paku masak cili with some daging dinding today and it was perfect.

Price : Depending on what you order, this should not set you back more than RM10 per head. Which is great value! Of course, if you load up several plates with dishes (and believe me, it's very tempting to do) it'll cost you a bit more.

Oh, and let me not forget their other speciality, the botok botok which is a bit like otak otak but bigger, green, and has half a small fish in it.

Return Trip ? : Definitely. There's such a wide variety that you won't be eating anything twice even after 10 trips.

...happy squirrels..