Anniversary Celebration @ Shangri-La Hotel Kuala Lumpur

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4th February 2007 was an eventful day for both of us. Firstly, it was our 1st anniversary. Secondly, it was the day that we officially launched our website. Then thirdly, Sze proposed to me on that day too…

And after all that has happened in the morning, we had to rush for a buffet lunch at the Shangri-La Hotel Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which we had booked earlier. We arrived at the Lemon Garden coffee house at around 1.30pm. It was already packed with people by then. The waitress led us to our table and almost immediately, we started checking out the food. As we were looking around, we bumped into Sze’s cousin… what a coincidence! She was there with her family who were attending a company lunch. Later on, we walked over to her table and met her husband, son and mother too.

We filled our plates and started to enjoy the feast. The variety of food was fairly wide - I don’t usually go for buffet meals but this is a place that I would definitely recommend to anyone. There were separate sections for Chinese, Malay/Indian, Western and Italian cuisine. But the most eye-catching spread that caught my attention was the DESSERT section - they had this huge chocolate fondue fountain! I didn’t want to wait and even considered starting the meal with dessert… hehe. But then again I thought, “I don’t want to end up eating just dessert for lunch”.

So for our first serving, I took some raw salmon fish, sliced lamb and salad with lots of capsicums. I love both lamb and capsicums. This was definitely my favorite plate of the meal. Sze got himself an oriental plate. He likes Chinese food. So what were his thoughts at that time? “I’m hungry. Let’s eat. There’s enough room in my tummy for everything. I’ll start from the left side of the buffet…” Humph…

My second serving was a mixed plate of curry lamb, fish and vegetables, mussels, capsicums (I really love capsicums), salmon and white rice. Sze called it my “Shangri-La mixed rice”… haha.

For his next serving, Sze took a plateful of raw salmon and tuna, decorated with slices of lime. As salmon is an expensive item, it is definitely something you’ll want to eat as much as you can in a buffet. I had another small helping of the salmon, polenta and salad while he had a taste of the roast lamb with mint sauce, fish, polenta and asparagus, plus an additional serving of the Chinese food… (he wasn’t kidding when he said that his tummy had room for everything!)

Finally, it was time for dessert… yay! We took a couple of attractively decorated cakes - Sze thought that the 3 strawberries on one of the cakes looked like… err... “very interesting???” Hmm…

But the highlight of choosing our dessert was, of course, dipping sticks of honeydew, marshmallow and pastry into the chocolate fountain. Again, Sze had a name for it – just like the title from Johnny Depp’s movie, he called it, “Eunice and the Chocolate Factory”…

And while we were “manufacturing” the chocolate sticks, we also saw an interesting-looking prawn and scallop cocktail. It was probably meant to be an appetizer but we didn’t notice it earlier. When we came back from choosing our dessert, the waiter had actually cleared our table, thinking that we had left. Sze thought, “Oh yeah, no need to pay – just walk out now!”

Lastly, we also had a taste of hazelnut and chocolate ice cream. We washed down our meal down with coffee – I prefer black coffee while Sze’s coffee is always “double double” (i.e. double servings of both cream and sugar).

It was already 4pm then, we were totally stuffed, and it was time to go. So we paid the bill (no, we didn’t just walk out after the waiter cleared our table) and left with pleasant memories and plenty of photographs!