Saravanaa Bhavan Restaurant • Petaling Jaya — Restaurant in Petaling Jaya

I am a patron of this restaurant since its establishment in PJ. Food and services were exceptional back then. The waiters were polite, attentive and ready to serve at one call.

But now, everything plunged to the worst. I won't accept Covid-19 as an excuse for the worker's unruly attitude and degraded food quality.

The worker The worker (The one in the picture) is as if not interested in attending to the customers. Possibly, by his rude gesture, he is implying 'Why did you come?'. On 8/1/2023, Sunday- when we were placing our orders, he rushed us to order 'All at one go including tea coffee' for which I questioned him would the restaurant be closing soon. He quipped, apparently too annoyed with my concern. Then, to revenge us, he purposely delayed serving us the coffee and tea which were prepared by the beverage master 15 min ago. By the time it arrived, the tea had gone warm. In fact the tea tasted as if the tea decoction was spoilt. We did return the 'warm tea' explaining the condition of the tea. But this guy hesitated to accept and unwillingly cleared the tea, as if nothing wrong with it. But within minutes, he replaced new ones with fresh hot cuppa. So, we concluded that if you do not surrender to his whimsical capricious attitude, you may have stale food or such spoilt tea which the above incident suggest to be very intentional.

The food In all our meals, the only vegetable is fried cabbage. The rest are small curry varieties, rasam, curd, butter milk and sweet. If they have option of poori and chapati, if you opt for Poori, the waiter seems to get annoyed as if we are too demanding and should accept whatever he serves without complain. Do not get carried away with illustrative pictures as the actually arrived ones are too disappointing.

Besides that, immediately after indulging into the 'Kesari', we felt drunk and intoxicated as if we took alcoholic beverage. We are completely alright with this 'drunk' experience as we are not Vegetarians. But wonder about the 'Halal'ness and the 'pure' high food quality being greatly propagated.

My ONE STAR is for the ponni rice in each meal and clean washroom.

Expected outcome We choose exclusive place for quiet and peaceful fine dining. But just imagine if ended up with one fickle-minded toxic waiter paired with below average food? I believe the restaurant's reply, if any, would sound as if they regret for such incident and 'they will improve continuously' but I bet ' the improvement would never take place'. If the restaurant management really value their customers and take all these reviews seriously, I would propose to remove the rude staff from the branch and 'compensate' all of us for exclusive complimentary dining treat. At least to give the restaurant 'second chance'....

Worse items ordered:

1. onions rava thosai & chutney
2. rasam vadai
3. apple juice

Onion rava thosai was not crispy and was soggy due to being uncooked. For the first time I had an onion rava thosai without peppercorns in it. Manager’s response to it was baffling as he states the peppercorn is included in the batter and was unfortunate to not be included in the portion that was so called ‘cooked’ for me.

The coconut chutney (white in colour) was watery and has lost its chutney consistency. Forget about the other two kind of chutney (pudina and spicy), it was far worse!

Rasam vadai was salty and thus has lost its taste of rasam instead tasted as weird salty soup.

Apple juice did not taste like apple juice at all. Didn’t bother to finish it.

Seated on the upper floor and lacked waiters to accommodate the influx of customers, worse the wash basin upstairs did not have hand wash and we had to make our way downstairs.

Manager was apprehensive to our feedback and was sarcastic by saying do you have any other ‘complains’? He had all sort of reasons to validate to our feedback which was not accepted and we left the restaurant feeling disheartened by and distasteful.

Surely will never return to this outlet. Should I be hopeful for the other outlets? I am doubtful.

The only items that was worth visiting was Mango Lassi and the weekend...

I wish there was a ZERO star rating. I’ve always loved going to this place despite their price. Yesterday was a total disaster which overshadowed my entire positive experience I had with this place. So I was very hungry and decided to dine in at Saravana Bhavan. This place was very free yesterday at around 4pm (mind you that this place is always crowded) so I thought I was lucky since there was hardly even 5 customers in the shop. My husband and I sat down in a table that was right opposite the counter and waited for good 10min to be given a menu. The person in the cashier saw us and despite being called decided to clean up his cashier table and only came after we desperately called for him (to clean the table and to give us the menu). So he came and wanted to wipe the table so I asked for the menu and stated that I was very hungry so at least while he cleans the table I can pick my food. His comment was “if you’re hungry you should have come early and eat”! This comment was made in tamil language and it was the absolute worse treatment a customer can get (while being hungry) I asked him to repeat what he said and he said the same thing again. We walked out. I expressed my disappointment that I am a regular there and that comment was seriously uncalled for. It’s a shame. I don’t think I’ll be going there to dine in...