Curios-City Penang — Restaurant in George Town

What an amazing experience! Such a beautiful place for a dinner with a group of friends or a couple’s date! Top notch food and service. Start early with drinks & bites & finish with an 8 course menu / 4 course menu I think also available but why to downsize if you can get the full experience!? Top favourite dishes: Mackerel with leeks & caviar Cauliflower ice cream for appetiser was phenomenal! Bread & truffle butter was beyond delicious and we ordered a second portion of it 😬🫣 lamb was perfectly cooked & done nicely Least favourite: Baby octopus which was lacking of some texture & maybe a kick of lemon/ acidity & a spiciness Chicken leg, which was good but wouldn’t recommend it as it doesn’t pair well with the rest of the experience, although I do understand the reason for being on the menu. Risotto was delicious maybe the river prawn needed something to make it more palatable, butter? Garlic? Chilli? Some extra basil would help too.

Food flavour/ preference is different for each person so don’t take me wrong about the least favourite ones- there were still awesome but couldn’t compete with my top ones.

I highly recommend it to everyone & it’s absolutely worth every penny!

Looking forward to come...

For dinner, we decided to treat ourselves to an impromptu fine dining meal in Penang and chose this place which was listed on the Michelin Selected guide. We requested that the menu be sized down by omitting the second main (to remove the overly carb heavy risotto) and we’re grateful the kitchen obliged although not without a bit of negotiating.

I’d give the overall taste a 7 out of 10. The seafood chowder was solid, and the dessert was excellent. But I found the palate cleanser oddly large, and I really didn’t expect canned longans at a Michelin-listed place. The mains were also a little underwhelming.

The biggest letdown, though, was the cutlery. A fine dining restaurant should serve with better quality utensils, something with weight and the right type of spoon or knife for each dish. The service was about a 6. Not all the servers seemed to know what they were serving, and some dishes arrived without any explanation.

To be fair, I wouldn’t be this fussy if the place wasn’t listed in the Michelin guide. But if you’re going to be featured, even as “Selected,” some level of consistency and finesse should be expected. Maybe I’ve just watched too much The Bear, but still,...

Mixed evening with some highs but the key ingredient of fabulous food was missing. Some notes: the space is amongst the most beautiful restaurant spaces I’ve seen in Penang. Spectacular and worthy of being very popular (although they will have noise issues if they get really busy…) Good ambience, but we needed an additional light to both read the menu and see what we were eating. There are likely better more sympathetic ways of addressing this. Good cocktails - pina colada best ever, sour plain mojito brilliant. Margarita a bit too sour (not well balanced). Food: hmmm. Great kerabu (best dish). Mains were sadly very ordinary. Lamb shank (replacing rack of lamb) needed another 30 mins to be really tender. Fish well cooked but just not interestingly sauced or paired. The lobster was excellent - well cooked, good flavour. Dessert - weird. Nice ice cream. Wine: list really needs work. Doesn’t include the country, year, grape variety of most wines. We had to ask for bottles to see what the wine might actually be! The staff tried hard but didn’t seem very confident. Result: massive potential. Trying too hard and missing too badly. And given that - far too expensive for the...