KUALA LUMPUR, June 2 — It is hard to overstate the significance of gathering for a meal, be it with family or friends, especially for a special occasion that deserves a meal special enough to match it.
Chinese restaurants have long been popular venues, particularly those capable of hosting banquets and large gatherings.
However, planning can be daunting and juggling everyone's preferences while sampling various dishes can complicate decision-making.
This is why I prefer to leave it almost entirely out of my hands — enter the set menu.
Set menus at Chinese restaurants are most popular during festive periods, with offerings often reflecting the seasonal nature of these occasions.
However, this isn’t quite the case at M Cuisine, where set menus for a variety of party sizes — including a peculiar five-course-set meant for individuals - are offered year-round in addition to their seasonal set menus.
Positioning itself as "not just another” traditional Chinese restaurant, M Cuisine's interior features an exposed brick wall and fully embraces a dark-brown, black, and gold colour scheme, free of the typical trappings of a traditional Chinese banquet restaurant.
Finding your way here isn’t as simple as it should be, however. The restaurant is located on the ground floor of block B in Plaza Arkadia, with the main entrance facing out towards the open-air car park across the road.
This is the first shop lot the restaurant started with when opening in 2020 before they expanded to include a shop lot directly behind the original, facing the inside row.
Named "M Cuisine Signature”, this lot houses the majority of the big private rooms available for booking.
In March 2023, they took the lot next to the original location, naming it "M Cuisine Classic”. Unless you’ve requested a specific room when you called to book, it’s a better idea to enter from the original shop lot.
I went with some of my extended family for dinner at about 7.30 pm on a Sunday and found the place rather... quiet.
Just next door, "M Cuisine Classic” was full and inching towards raucous status, but the partition shielded us from that.
However, it was a bit strange to experience such a quiet atmosphere in a Chinese restaurant without being in a private room. On reflection, it almost resembled a more formal affair, which I am now realising may be the point.
Ordering for eight people is one thing; reading through four different menus to do so is a whole different beast. Thankfully, the "world’s first” roast London duck skin with Taiwanese mullet roe tasting menu (RM1,888/8pax) presented itself as the most viable option.
A quartet of little bites started things off: a slice of sweet and slightly tart preserved fruit tomato, a crispy and cheesy scallop puff, a seafood ball skewer in a sweet-ish Japanese sauce and an utterly delicious toast roll with chicken floss and Spanish ham.
They waste no time getting to the main event: the first of five main courses, the duck is served two ways. First, the skin is removed and served Peking duck style in a thin pancake with cucumber, pear and a sliver of mullet roe. The latter isn’t nearly as salty or as hard as bottarga is; as a result, it’s rendered rather ineffectual toward the dish.
It’s worth mentioning that the sweet sauce was phenomenal, complex with distinct notes of dried tangerine peel.
The second way is the roast duck itself, served with plum sauce and the like. It was tasty and juicy, but not nearly as fat as some of the "London duck” I’ve had at other places.
Next was soup, a double-boiled ginseng soup with fish maw and sea whelk. The soup did not hold back on the flavour of ginseng, and I thought it could’ve been made a little sweeter to balance out the bitterness, but the fish maw was top-drawer stuff.
Silky, springy but still soft, it is a far cry from the chewy, rubbery fish maw often served elsewhere.
After a shaky start, the finish proved strong. Next was one of the more phallic foods I’ve had the pleasure of putting in my mouth: sea cucumber.
This was excellent all around: the sea cucumber was supple but firm, never approaching mushy and the sauce — the abalone sauce had an ambrosiac quality to it that was simply undeniable.
The meal went from strength to strength with the deep-fried snow crab legs next. The shell was soft enough to coax out the sweet crab flesh with our mouths alone, and a dangerously addictive salt and chili mixture. One of the better deep-fried preparations of crab I’ve had recently.
The best dish of the night was the last: claypot rice with leopard coral trout and truffles. At first glance, it looked rather pale and underwhelming, but each spoonful was bursting with the flavour of the fish in which the rice was cooked.
Most impressive was the incorporation of truffle. The ingredient is not new to Chinese kitchens, yet it is often included in a hackneyed, sometimes needless manner.
Here, the clean, subtle, and sweet flavours of the fish, corn, and rice provided the ideal backdrop for the earthy, unique flavour of the truffle to shine, demonstrating a skilled understanding of how to use the ingredient.
We closed out the meal with not one, but two desserts. First was a double-boiled snow pear with peach gum and 30-year-old tangerine peel, which expressed the deeper, more intense flavours of the rind in a mostly sweet broth.
The second was the cutest (and also delicious) steamed banana buns, made to look like bananas — complete with realistic bruising — and filled with banana-flavoured custard. The whole thing was bananas!
M Cuisine (Plaza Arkadia)
B-G-3A, Plaza Arkadia, Jalan, Medan Residen, Desa Parkcity, 52200 Kuala Lumpur
Open daily, 11.30am-2.30pm, 5.30-10.30pm
Tel: 012-618 1289
Facebook: @Mcuisine.my
Instagram: @m_cuisine_plaza_arkadia
* This is an independent review where the writer paid for the meal.
* Follow us on Instagram @eatdrinkmm for more food gems.
