Bar Italia Needs To Get Its Act Together
29 Jalan Berangan, Kuala Lumpur
I wanted to like this place. It opened some time ago in KL to as much hype as any new venture of Paolo Guiati’s, ex-Neroteca, would be expected to have. We genuinely liked Neroteca back then; it was a chilled out space at the ground floor of Somerset Apartments in Jalan Ceylon, away from the madding crowd, had free wifi, lots of Italian wine and beer, decent Italian food (for KL anyway), and real pig. Bar Italia seemed to be taking a page out of that book. At first glance, the swanky but understated shophouse lot on Jalan Berangan (a stone’s throw from Changkat Bukit Bintang) appeared promising.
To cut to the chase, not only do I dislike this place now, I dislike it so vehemently that I am breaking one unsaid rule of Popagandhi.com: to use my site as a platform to complain at length about it. The quick verdict: the food sucked. Bad food is not criteria enough for me to devote such a long space to this. I guess you can put it down to this: Bar Italia had horrible food AND the worst service I’ve ever had in my entire, entire life. Period.
I won’t spend much time dwelling on the food. There were plenty of huh? moments. The menu was as insipid as the wine, but with a table of 8 we ordered, I suppose, a sampling of just about everything. Pastas, lasagnas, fish and meat mains. The food was an absolute let-down — nothing one would expect of ex-Neroteca talent. My fish main gave me the impression that I was better off eating fish and chips from a Malaysianized Western stall. Their pastas tasted of not very much. Fine.
[Reading some forums and blogs, and comments left by Bar Italia defenders (who sound suspiciously like each other), it seems like anybody who complained about the food was told, "you just don't know what Italian food really is!" I write and photograph food for a living; I'm supposed to. But if only the food was my primary complaint!]
Bar Italia has the worst service in KL, which is not an easy throne to ascend to so quickly in several months. You essentially have to out-suck the inattentive, impatient, incompetent and aggressive service levels at all the other restaurants in Malaysia, which is a fair number of them. But that was the one thing Bar Italia did very well.
How well? We weren’t sure anybody spoke English in that place. For an upmarket establishment, that is unacceptable. It wasn’t even like anybody spoke Malay. Service staff chattered to each other in Cantonese, mostly ignoring customers. The Italian dude (was it Paolo?) spoke English, but was more or less incoherent — it wasn’t the accent, it was just how he flitted from table to table mid-sentence without completing any, and went off without properly understanding what anybody was saying.
Since the menu was so badly put together, most of us came away not properly understanding what our options were, and needed assistance. Assistance that wasn’t rendered. Simple questions like “so which pasta has which sauces, tomato or cream?” were greeted with blank stares by the waitress. Did she speak English? Did she speak Malay? Maybe she’s was Burmese? Nepali? Maybe she really just didn’t understand English? Who didn’t even know how to say “I don’t know, I’ll ask,” so we had to ask for her. “Can you get someone who knows to serve us?” Another long, blank stare. It was the same with every other waiter, including Italian dude. Questions were cut short, requests (even for water, or the bill) either never arrived or took half an hour to, nobody was interested in doing business. Dumb (and I mean this in a literal, not-talking sense) waitress went back to chattering in a corner in Cantonese, probably complaining about all her customers. Great — if only she knew we all understand Cantonese too.
Just as we thought the nightmare was over, the bill came and had an additional entry for 80 ringgit for 3 glasses of wine we never drank. A simple “can you look through this again” request was pointedly rejected by Italian dude, for no good reason other than him saying “no”, flatly. We’d tried to take the bad food and terrible service in our stride all night, but this was too much. Only when 8 angry people glared at him did he abruptly throw a hundred ringgit back at us… literally.
No matter how bad food was anywhere, I don’t think I’ve ever felt “I’ll never come back here ever again and you don’t deserve to call this a restaurant”. Well, I’ve found that place, and Bar Italia — 29 Jalan Berangan — is it.
