Bartolo — Restaurant in Kuala Lumpur

I’ve been wanting to come here for such a long time after seeing their jazz night every Thursday and how their food looks so scrumptious on IG.

But parking was insane. I wish their IG has stayed on where we can park as I didn’t know it’s located behind Central market. We spend a lot of time looking for cheap parking (as the Central Market parking is truly a cut-throat place that targets foreigners). And thankfully, it wasn’t raining as you need to walk a bit of a distance to get there and it’s located upstairs.

Overall my experience was truly disappointed. Their Portuguese tarts have nothing to shout about. I’ve tried all of their flavours cause I was genuinely excited to try out their famous Portuguese tarts. It’s quite sweet and the texture of their fillings is not what I’ve expected. Crust is so so. Their classic tart has a texture-like taste like kaya jam? Hazelnut was not nice at all as the nuts does not go well with the overall tart taste - it taste like Chinese muachi? Chocolate and strawberry was underwhelming.

I am quite a slow lot when it comes to ordering food. But this waitress doesn’t get the cue and immediately asked for what we want to order for our drinks when we don’t look prepared at all to give in our order yet. So, we order a classic gin and tonic as it’s quite cheap here. And no wonder cause it came in a short and small glass.

Then comes the food. Upon looking at the dinner menu, and without any images to refer to on how it look like (their linktree has beepit but not all of the dinner menu items are in there so, we have to google them ourselves), we are stuck in choosing what to eat because most of them are quite unfamiliar. But we make our decision in choosing the steak and the codfish.

The presentation was again, underwhelming for the steak and the same goes for the taste of the codfish as it’s really salty after a few bites. But it has nothing else to offer other than smashed codfish paste and some thin matchstick potatoes.

The steak is slightly better but we find it to be too chewy with the unfamiliar gelatine-like sauce. The potatoes however are the only thing we love about this dish.

And we ordered the croquettes to fill in our tastebuds cause we like fried appetisers but unfortunately again, it’s not up to our liking and we just chow them all down so that we can head out of this place.

We look again at their menu to find any hope left for this restaurant and find that their lunch menu is much better than their dinner menu. Both of us went back disappointed and went off to another place that is much cheaper yet tasty to fill...

I must have come on a bad day. On top of that, I wasn't wearing my dollar sign t-shirt. I didn't expect the royal treatment but noone said hi, no "would you like to see our menu?" or "are you here for our happy hour?" As a brand new customer, I had zero knowledge what to do at this establishment. Do I wait to be seated? Do I grab a menu and go find a table? Do I order at the counter?

I went up to the till and asked if there was a weekend sunset special event. Instead of offering information, I had to keep asking for information. I was supposed to have known before hand how things worked, it seems. I didn't and I wanted to find out. I'm an extroverted Gen X, I need a proper conversation, even if it's broken english.

By the time I sat down, I was still confused how the flow chart looked like at this place. I waved for a waiter, asked him if HE was Bartolo, he said yes. It turned out, he was a new wait staff and didn't know what I meant. Nor did he know I needed service, forget about the greeting at that point.

Do not come here for any sort of proper sit-down table service, nor any warm greeting. Treat this place like a fast food restaurant with alcohol, and you will be satisfied. Speaking of tables, mine was wobbly, found out as I was cutting up a croquette. I didn't spill any of the precious alcoholic beverage from the wobbling. Thank goodness. By that time, I had given up on any good service and decided to fix the wobbling myself. No issue there.

Next is the sandwich. I don't know how things are usually done in a Portugese restaurant, but there was a good cm around the rim of the sandwich that was pure bread. No spread or butter of any kind a whole cm by the rim of the bread. (See picture) I mean even the eggplant et al did not fill to the rim. That I don't mine, but please consider spreading a bit more of something in that 1 cm. Unless there is a culinary rule against that?

When the proper manager finally showed up, he had gotten wind of my displeasure. i ordered another round of the weekend happy hour special combo with him (had to walk to the till for that). And here's the spiel : my first round of that same combo was punched in wrongly. I was given twice the amount of croquettes. Naturally, I wanted the same amount of croquettes this second round. But no.

Training issue? Briefing? Missed the memo?

On a positive note, the weekend happy hour combo was good. I had two...

Extremely let down by their service - more specifically, how they dealt with a mistake they’d made on their own end.

We visited on a Saturday, and while we initially planned on ordering the steak sandwich and matcha Berliner (both ala carte), one of the floor staff recommended (when we were ordering) that we opt for their meal deal (which would include the steak sandwich that we were already planning to order, a drink (coffee/juice) and a pastel de nata) which would give us more bang for our buck. We happily went with his suggestion, only for him to return about 10-15 minutes later to inform us that the meal deal was only available on weekdays. No further explanation was provided on how we would be billed (i.e. whether they’d honour their words or charge us the ala carte price for each individual item that would otherwise make up the meal deal) - which in hindsight we should’ve asked about. Anyway, as anticipated, we were eventually billed the full ala carte price for everything when we made payment - except for the pastel de nata (that was supposed to be part of the meal deal) + a second pastel de nata (that they eventually served us because they saw us struggling to cut the first one nicely into half), both of which were on the house.

That said, we really enjoyed their food, albeit the slightly steeper pricing. Interior was really nice too (although it might be worth noting that the place is only partially air-conditioned as they have an open-air seating area too, so it can get a bit warm on hot days).

Overall, it was a great experience (food-wise) turned sour (as we’d expected them to honour their words and bill us the meal deal price since it was a slip-up on their end, not ours). The slip-up aside, I would probably still return to try the other items on their menu, but I hope they really work on and improve their customer service + how they resolve mistakes made...