Khazana - A Food Review

Whitchurch Village in Cardiff is dotted with many wonderful restaurants offering different cuisines from different cultures including Italian, Thai, British, Chinese and Indian.

This time, we visited an Indian restaurant called Khazana to celebrate a colleague's birthday and to meet up with an old friend.


We were greeted with a nice smile as soon as we arrived and was led into a dining space with a very nice ambience with dim lights.

According to my colleague, who recommended that place, Khazana has changed management over a year ago, undergone renovation, and is now much better than before!

So, without further ado, we 'studied' the menu in great detail as it seems to offer so many different dishes. Different meat and vegetarian dishes and so many different types of curries, not what you would normally see in an Indian restaurant in Cardiff.

Menu

After much deliberation, most of us went for the Butterfly Prawns for starters.

It did come out looking somewhat like a beautiful butterfly - deep fried!

It looked really delicious, perfectly deep fried in a nice batter, giving it a nice crunch with the big juicy prawn. Those who had this, loved it!

Butterfly Prawn

I went for the unconventional (to me personally) duck dish to start. Maybe it is a common thing in an Indian restaurant, but I have never seen a duck as a starter in one!

Duck Breast

The duck was nicely roasted and the sticky sauce went really well with it. The sauce has a nice sweetness to it, almost like a plum sauce. While the sauce in the little pot just added some spice and kick to cut through the sweetness of the sticky sauce.

Then it was the main dishes to follow, with a bit of pilau rice and some naan breads......

Murgh Anarosh 

Again, I liked something unique and went for the Murgh Anarosh. Which consists of strips of chicken marinated in chef's special recipe (a restaurant secret of course) stuffed in a pineapple shell!

Pineapple cap off

Not only it looked amazing, it tasted amazing too!

As promised, it was a mild curry (yep! I cannot take food which is TOOOOO spicy!). It has a wonderful array of spices in the sauce, a citrusy sweetness from pineapple pieces, and I can taste some almond and coconut flavours coming through.

Wonderfully delicious eaten with some pilau rice and coconut naan bread!

Monkfish

One of our colleague ordered the Chef's special monkfish cooked in Chef's special recipe (again, a restaurant secret). It looked amazing!

Coconut Naan Bread

A very nice meal, good ambience, delicious food and of course wonderful people!

I would definitely come here again.

South East Asian Food in Cardiff

One might think that I will not want to have anymore Asian food since I just got back from Malaysia and Singapore.

But how can I resist opportunities to try out new places in town?! These restaurants are not exactly brand new or just open in town, it is just that I only recently found out about them!

Pho Bac in Canton, Cardiff.

From the name of the restaurant, you can safely guess that it is a Vietnamese restaurant! I got really excited that there is finally a Vietnamese restaurant in town!

The last time I had Vietnamese food was during my holiday in Kota Kinabalu, it was not that exciting so I did not blog about it. KK food need to improve!

The last time I had GOOD Vietnamese cuisine in the UK was in Hoxton, London. When I say good, I mean very good!

The menu looked impressive with lots of authentic Vietnamese dishes like the Rice Paper Summer Rolls, Roast Pigeon, Beef Noodle Soup, Cold Vermicelli Salad etc.

Shredded mango and ginger Tilapia

The Tilapia with Shredded mango and ginger was delicious! Deep fried Tilapia with a nice crunch, accompanied by sweet, sour and slightly spicy sauce, to top it up with some summery flavour of mango - perfect South East Asian taste!

Cold Vermicelli Salad

The Cold Vermicelli Salad that I ordered was absolutely comparable with the one I had in Song Que last year! It was served similar with grilled pork, deep fried rolls, lots of julienne daikon, crushed peanuts and of course the signature mint leaves! Drizzle with the special Vietnamese sweet chilli sauce.

The grilled pork had a fragrant char-grilled taste to it and the spring rolls was nicely deep fried which added a crunchy texture to the dish.

The dish could have been better if they added julienne carrots and cucumber to make it even more like the original. But that is just me being a perfectionist in food, nevertheless, this one is good enough!

Crispy Noodle with Seafood

We also ordered the Crispy Noodle served with Seafood. This dish is not dissimilar to the Cantonese Crispy Noodle.

What took us by surprise was the sheer enormity of the dish! There was so much noodle and seafood at a reasonable price of GBP 8!

The noodle was nicely fried and maintained a nice crunch, with a thick tasty sauce giving a nice fresh seafood flavour to it. I must also praise the well cooked squid as it was not chewy at all and had a very soft texture. So nice that I could have the squid all day long (just joking, need to watch the cholesterol!).


Vietnamese done, Malaysian next!

1Malaysia - where food is 'prepared with high authenticity and originality, eliminating commercial flavour!"

After dining here, we can surely vouch for that brave claim of bringing original and authentic Malaysian flavours to Cardiff!

Murtabak 

For starters, we had the Murtabak stuffed with chicken. This is an Indian style pancake with stuffing. The Murtabak is actually found commonly in Saudi Arabia, but Malaysians call it Indian pancakes as it is commonly (if not entirely) found in Indian Mamak stalls or shops only!

The variety without stuffing is called Roti Canai, which is also available in this restaurant.

The Murtabak we had was served with Dal and I absolutely loved it! The chicken stuffing was well marinated and had lots of Indian spices and curry flavours!

Nasi Lemak

For mains, we had the Nasi Lemak, which literally translates into fatty rice!

It is a Malay dish whereby coconut rice is served with belacan with squids (spicy shrimp paste sauce), fried ikan bilis (dried anchovies), peanuts, cucumber, chicken curry and of course the hard boiled egg.

All the flavours were nicely balanced with lots of different textures from the crunchy fried ikan bilis and peanuts to the soft and spicy squid in belacan. The coconut rice was of course very fragrant, served with spicy chicken curry. The cucumber and hard boiled egg nicely diffused the spiciness of all the other ingredients. Delicious!

Laksa Lemak

We also had the Laksa Lemak  for mains and it looked absolutely beautiful (and spicy!).

Served with lots of fresh king prawns and squids, this is a dish for the brave as it is very spicy (but in a nice way).

It has a nice chilli spiciness to it but it is not THAT spicy that it tingles your tongue until you lose all sense of taste.

It's the wonderful combination of spices, herbs, chillies that make South East Asian food so wonderfully flavourful and delicious!

Dessert Platter

Because we could not decided and what dessert to order, the very kind owner of the restaurant treated us to this dessert platter!

On the platter was banana fritters, Fried rolls stuffed with shredded coconut meat, Chinese Jian Deui (my favourite) and ice-cream.

A Malaysian dessert platter giving a perfect end to a wonderful and authentic Malaysian dinner!

This meal depicts the multi-cultural and multi-racial Malaysia with Chinese, Indian and Malay food all under one roof!

Party Play

"Don't play play ohhhh..."

Following all the hype about this new joint in town (well, fairly new), I finally had the opportunity to pay a visit during this trip back home. We decided to celebrate my mom's birthday early by trying out this restaurant.

Most of the blog posts, reviews, friends' comments about this place were good, so we were waiting with anticipation to enjoy nice food in this place as they do not come cheap.

Menu

It all started well with an interesting looking menu which was specially designed to look like a lifestyle magazine. On the second page was an article about the many great achievements and experiences of the chef/owner of Party Play.

As we were browsing through the pages, we found it rather difficult to see clearly what they have to offer as the menu was dominated by photos and the descriptions were randomly put all over the photos! Have a look at the menu and you can see what I mean.

After much effort, we finally decided on the Classic Lamb Shoulder and Meat Lover Platter for 2.

Watermelon Juice

Oh! and of course we ordered some drinks too while waiting for our food to come.

My parents ordered the pineapple juice as they looked nice on the drinks menu while I went for the watermelon juice (my favourite).

Well, were we not disappointed when the drinks arrived and all we had was HALF filled (small) round glasses of juice which cost RM6 and RM8 each! The size of the glass was not really the biggest issue, what thrown us was the fact that the juice tasted like it was made from squash but was advertised on the menu as FRESH pineapple juice!

Lamb Shoulder

Well, we thought that all will be forgiven by how good the food would be.

So I was really excited when my Classic Lamb Shoulder arrived. I was delighted with the look of the delicious looking char-grilled lamb shoulders and that creamy mash potatoes.

I could not wait to put my knife into the lamb. Well, well, well, did I have a job trying to cut the tough piece of lamb on a plate that kept rotating like a flying saucer on the table! Aha! you guessed right, the plate was not flat on the bottom, hence the plate was spinning like a turntable (like those you find on a round table in a Chinese restaurant).

After we managed to get the kitchen to change my plate, I still had difficulties cutting into the tough lamb and I suspect that it must have been over-cooked.

So, I spent all evening trying to chew my dinner so that I can swallow it without risking any indigestion later.

Even my creamy mash was a little bit of a disappointment, especially when mash potato is one of my favourite side dishes. The mash still had bits of potatoes pieces in it, maybe it was meant to be that way but to me, a good mash should be all smooth and silky ie NO potato pieces left in it!

Meat Lover Platter

NB apologies for the over-exposed photo of the Meat Lover Platter.


I shall not say much about the Meat Lover Platter for 2 as I have nothing good to say about it either. Look at page 8 of the menu.

Doesn't it look amazing on that wooden block just like a Ploughman's Lunch?

Well, look at the photo above. Instead of serving all the different types of meat separately on the dish, so that we can enjoy the different meat individually; the steak, lamb, chicken and sausage were all piled up in one big heap that we couldn't even tell what is what!

What was shocking as well, was that the rack of lamb was not trimmed to reveal the bones and to remove the excess fat as that is a basic 'French'  rack of lamb preparation method.

We expected more from a restaurant of this 'stature' (and pricing)!

On that note, you can safely guess that we shall not be going back to this restaurant again and nor shall we recommend it to any friends!


Being dissatisfied with our dinner, we decided to go to hawker stalls at Tanjung Aru Beach for some local food.

Coconut

Sate

Chicken and Beef Sate with Coconut water - local, cheap and simply the better food!