Upscale and Trendy

First Published in Options, The Edge, 20 June 2016

This trendy and stylish restaurant serving Western food in an upmarket neighbourhood strikes all the right notes.

The glass door with the sign declaring “Life is better upstairs” leads upstairs to Bobo, laid out in a cool, contemporary style with an upscale feel from tables covered in white tablecloths, folded cloth napkins and gleaming tableware.  Prints lining the walls, classic wooden chairs, and wooden flooring complete the look.  Curtains section off a cosy sitting area with a sliding glass door to the outside balcony providing relief for smokers.

At the top of the stairs, a sliding door, disguised as a wooden partition leads to the music lounge one floor up, with live music every night.

We surveyed a menu with a small selection of mains, a goodly selection of platters for sharing, some pastas and a generous drinks list.  A couple of local items stood out in the otherwise resolutely Western-themed menu.

We sampled everything in the Soups section. The Creamy Mushroom soup (Rm24) was dark, and redolent with the fragrance of truffle oil. The soup was coarse-textured with ground fresh mushrooms, hot and comforting and not as creamy as many mushroom soups tend to be. 

The dark orange Traditional Prawn Bisque (Rm28) had a token prawn on bread with salmon roe by the side. The bisque was lovely, thick and velvety smooth with a deep underlying flavor of prawn without a hint of fishiness. 

The Mamak Style Oxtail Stew (Rm28) was served in a big claypot. Softened carrot and potato cubes lurked in the thick stew, pungent with the rich aroma of Asian spices.  Chunks of oxtail were fall-off-the bone tender.  Taken with toasted bread, this could have been a main meal, smoother, richer and less raw than the variety you find at Mamak roadside stalls.

The Green Garden Salad (Rm32) was more interesting than expected. Avocado slices, asparagus spears, olives and beans in the mix of salad and baby spinach leaves, were doused with the sour, piquant, green-tasting Green Goddess dressing.

In good order, our Mains arrived. The Fresh Australian Barramundi Paupiette (Rm75) looked like an elongated deep-fried popiah in a red wine sauce with chopped, braised leek. It was filled with white fish, and the combination of crispy, hot skin, combined with soft white fish, in a rich red sauce with bits of braised vegetable was not at all disagreeable, providing an unexpected depth and dimension to a fish dish.

The Black Angus Sirloin (Rm88) was presented in a crescent of cut meat, glistening dark brown on the outside, with a pink interior, and accompanied by roasted whole garlic and a triangle of dauphinoise potatoes, brown sauce and asparagus.  The meat was juicy but a little too fatty for my taste, and not as tender as I would have liked, but the accompaniments were accomplished, from the fragrant roasted garlic, to the not-too-creamy potatoes and accompanying brown sauce.

The Mee Goreng Mamak (RM28) was too intriguing to miss. It looked like the roadside variety, in a large portion, with all the right ingredients: squid rings, prawns, chicken pieces, cut potatoes, soft tofu, fritters, cut tomatoes and beansprouts. The ingredients were fresh, in far more generous proportions than you could hope to find at a roadside stall, but again, they don’t charge RM28 for a plate of mee mamak.  It tasted authentic, the tangled yellow mee, the sweet-sour-spicy combination, sweeter, and more refined than you would generally find in its roadside cousin, so if you’re suddenly overcome with the desire for mee mamak in a swanky setting, this is it.

For sweet endings, we had the Chocolate Lava Purse (Rm28), and the day’s cake, lime pie (Rm24), both served with Malaysian made Forty-Licks ice cream. The Lava Purse looked like limp muslin cloth enclosing a lumpy something, but the ‘cloth’ was pastry, and the lump was dark liquid chocolate that oozed out when the purse was broken.  It was wickedly rich and sweet, balanced out by vanilla ice cream.  The Lime pie had an unusual, likeable bitter-ish aftertaste from lime skin, making it honest and memorable.

Dining at Bobo is not inexpensive, yet the place was full, and diners arriving without reservations had to wait for a vacant table.  The food is generally fine and well-presented, if not standout memorable, but the upscale feel, the lure of music one floor up and location in Bangsar’s trendy Bangkung area, bear testimony to the glass door declaration that life is better upstairs.

Bobo,

65-1 Jalan Bangkung,

Bukit Bandaraya, Bangsar,

59100 Kuala Lumpur

Tel: +603 20925002

Facebook: BoboKualaLumpur

Business Hours: 5pm – 12am, closed on Mondays