Grub by Ahong & Friends — Restaurant in Petaling Jaya

Payment : if u make a rsvp there is a deposit.

Check with them if it bills directly to the card or it’s only if u don’t show up that it’s bill. From what I understand it doesn’t bill the card , only if u don’t turn up then the deposit will payment will b charged but I could be wrong 🤔

I dined in for lunch - 8 pax. One person made the booking.

Then comes the headache if one person is planning to buy the meal and not the one making the booking.

table comes with a QR code . The items won’t reflect everyone’s order just mainly what u order from ur phone. So if everyone starts poking on their own phone making the order it’s just their own order. Before placing the order u will come to a page where it says pay now with a variety of payment option or pay at counter.

Some will choose to pay directly and some pay at counter. One meal and 5 receipts 😩😩😩

It’s great for those who’s going on Dutch. You can pick ur meal and pay straight. It’s a little awkward when you’re buying people a meal 🫠

Ideally I think then just get everyone to put it as pay at counter and just note you HAVE TO MAKE PAYMENT before meal 😅 so yea.

I’m not a fan of the way this is but I’m sure they have their own reasons / limitations on this. Mayb people dine and dash. It would have been nice if they could inform us before hand. Cause I got pretty irritated, I can understand why but doesn’t mean at the moment I wasn’t all cranky.. 😩 trying to figure out who ordered what and transferring individually to 4 other person when all I just wanted was an easy simple meal 😖

It’s not a big deal but I’m writing it here cause I wished someone told me before hand.

The food overall it’s alright. I’ve dine here when they first started and honestly preferred the food back then.

It’s your neighbourhood kinda dining place. Will I come back ? Yea…when I run out of idea what to eat and craving for steak..

The mash is nice , fries is nice, steak medium rare but this time around felt slightly overcooked.bum hopping next time it be better. Wanted to order the tomahawk but was glad this round we didn’t.

Oo pani...

Tl;dr For the price, good food. Terrible atmosphere. Subpar service.

A first experience for me. And probably the last.

To start off with the good, this restaurant serves good food. The pani puri, pasta and steak were all enjoyable. Steak was seasoned well and medium rare, solid effort although the seasoning’s were quite basic. The pasta had huge meatballs, and portion sizes for all the dishes we ordered were great. No complaints there.

However, there’s much to complain elsewhere. In terms of the food, the meatballs were seasoned very “locally”, it tasted like if you asked the nasi lemak aunty to make Italian meatballs but she’s never tasted Italian meatballs before. Although not to my taste, maybe some customers enjoy the localised flavour. More of a nitpick than a complaint.

The elephant in the room however, is the room, or in this case the restaurant itself. It looked like a high school canteen. Cheap plastic chairs, ordinary tables, heavily scuffed and scratched cutleries, cheap curtains, the list goes on. I don’t usually have a problem with how a restaurant looks if they serve good food but in a menu, where the the pasta on average cost ~rm30, cheapest steak being rm130, and going up to rm1k+ for a 1kg tomahawk (for sharing or not). I genuinely felt put off. When charging so much for food, and rm3 for plain drinking water, and I still have to go get refill myself, not only was the ambience severely lacking, the service was also overly subpar. The staffs were friendly, but when paying rm150+ for two persons, I don’t expect to order from a QR code. A waiter making suggestions, taking my order, and perhaps upselling would’ve been nice.

In Malaysia, there’s a saying that if your restaurant serves good food, it doesn’t matter if the restaurant is sketchy. In fact, the sketchier the better. But in this case, I expected a lot more in other aspects that the food can’t make up for, especially when the price is so high.

Review...

Overall low rating ,there were gap between the given expectations and the actual satisfaction service. Firstly, the book was abit unfriendly, the system have a fix cut off time + required deposit by linking the credit cut (it was still normal) , after the cut off time would required phone call, however, it was a manual pick up and a staff pretenting himself as a robot to ask for whatsapp booking, with the same process of auto reply of booking on the system. These had brought an expressions of given high standards service. In fact, the price was high but the serving image was just normal just like it just worth RM30+ food taste was vary , thus will not much comment on it but overal it's ok and up to standard but not seem worth with the price setting. The overall arrangement seems messy as well , full self services pay first to order, basically no services was given. Lastly , stuff and atmosphere was not friendly , as my son was unwell and got a sudden vomit but the stuff said to us " if got anything , go to the toilet' speaking with no caring and empathy. The overal low review was due to the given expectation was not met as its shared on the social media, the food look very delicious and high class on social media and price in menu was around RM270+ however nothing...