Café Deli by El Mesón @ Sunway 163 Mall — Restaurant in Kuala Lumpur

Located right at the front of Kiara 163,the set up for this place is very tasteful and attractive. Ambience is nice and cosy, with lots of comfy seating, plants, wood tones and excellent display of their goods to make it feel like a quaint Euro style cafe.

Price-wise, the menu is a bit on the pricier side, with mains around the 20-40 range and drinks around the 8-20 range, which is not atypical for the area however.

While the servers were polite when they could actually pay attention to you, they seemed overwhelmed by the bustling business and it took me almost ten minutes to get the attention of someone to take my order. I ordered the Ultimate Burger since that was very prominently advertised. I also ordered one of the detox juices, 'Immune Kick'.

The food arrived pretty fast. The "Ultimate" burger is a misnomer, what you get is actually a very "Basic" burger. The burger components are OK on their own, but this burger was clearly designed by someone who does not understand what makes a good burger. The fries and dressing less salad are OK but unless you order add ons, the burger you get is a essentially a dry flattened meatball between two slices of dry brioche bun with a single leaf of lettuce/tomato in-between. They also serve the burger with a knife stabbed in the middle to hold it together which I find in very poor taste for presentation, but I understand it is popular recently.

The homemade tomato sauce they serve on the side with the burger is excellent however,easily the highlight of the whole dish.

The detox juice is not bad, but the flavours and fruit ratios are not balanced. For example my juice was supposed to be a blend of pineapple, carrot and ginger but you can't taste much the ginger or the pineapple because they are totally overwhelmed by the ratio of carrots.

Despite this I can taste the difference in the higher quality of the ingredients they use from other restaurants with lower pricing. Despite this, I'll be honest I felt underwhelmwd. However I will admit one factor influencing my review is that towards the end of my burger I bit into something very hard which turned out to be an almost 1cm piece of bone fragment in my burger patty. I can't say I was impressed by this. On informing the servers they were apologetic and said they would inform their supplier of the problem, but that was it.

Overall I wanted to like this place because it seems so pleasant to dine at but the service does needs some reinforcement and the food is a little underwhelming for the price point. To be fair I only tried one dish, it could be the other items are better and the pastries and coffee do look very good. But my advice to anyone trying this for the first time, avoid the burger, try something else from the...

[July 2022]

The environment won my heart in this interesting mall setting. Good pork burger Good portion for the set provided Decent for work-related chatter but not quiet enough for studying Indoor and outdoor seating available

Non-halal restaurant with a very woody sentiment. I was attracted by the set menu offered. Not sure how expensive red cheddar cheese should be but +RM6 into the set is quite pricey. Normally max RM4 is what I can think of but at least no regrets having that addition. The pork burger is juicy and succulent, with a good combo of fries. My only concern is that it is rather oily. Oil kept flowing out non-stop. RM31 excluding tax. It is decent since the appetiser was ham bruschetta.

Ambient environment with ample personal space for each table. Was fortunate to get a window seat where I can at least unwind a little. Soundproofing is actually decent.

Staff were friendly and hospitable. Although I’m an introvert I can tell that it’s a hospitable experience. One thing that I could not put round my head was that I was accidentally mistaken to have ordered more than what I have described, which got me a little annoyed since it was more than once. I wouldn’t put it to heart though.

If I have the money I would...

The food quality has deteriorated tremendously since my last visit. I ordered their french toast with bacon and it was honestly the saddest french toast I've ever had. The bread was soggy while the bacon was tasteless.

Ordered their garlic and chilli prawns as well and the prawns were overcooked and not fresh. Most of the prawns had a mushy texture.

Worst of all was the attitude we got from the restaurant manager. We asked him about how to redeem the RM20 credit all new members receive when you download their app and he told us that we can only use it on our next visit because they need to verify it in the system. We asked him what he meant by that because the credit was already showing up in our account and he rudely retorted "I already told you it cannot be used" several times, without giving us an explanation.

At least the assistant manager bothered to explain that their system needs 24 hours before it can recognise our credit even though it's already showing up in the app. Would've avoided a lot of grievances if the restaurant manager could just explain that to us instead of brushing us off rudely. Definitely will not be patronising Cafe Deli by El...