food / cooking / restaurants
Mr Prata is an Indian/Malaysian restaurant on the Ubud main road. It is a little along from the busy section of Ubud and misses a lot of business because of this.
There are a few Indian restaurants in Ubud, but not many other places to buy paratha. The taste is pretty authentic. It is part of a chain of restaurants.
Since we visited here last year they have done renovations, so your experience may be different from ours.
We only went here as it was pouring rain and we jumped out of a taxi and walked straight into this restaurant. It is located conveniently at the end of the restaurant strip on Jalan Alor. This place looked inviting and clean, is busy, but the food is nothing special and the service wooden. The food is overpriced, you are much better off heading just next door or any one of the many places along the road actually. On the menu is a mix of Chinese/Cantonese dishes, Malay dishes and other Asian styles.
On arrival there is a small bowl of peanuts on the table, presumably complimentary. You wont find out that they are not until you get the bill and find you have been charged RM3 if you have eaten them. You are not told there is a charge for the peanuts, so be wary.
Other Things You Should Know
This is a charming restaurant decorated in the original style of the 1930s, specializing in Nyonya cuisine. It may be hard to find in the backstreets of Chinatown, but worth the effort.
The premises is actually the old guild hall of the Selangor & Federal Territory Laundry Association, and provides a lovely ambiance to experience some local cuisine. The lady manager was very friendly when we visited here in 2010. For entree we tried lobak, which are spring roll like filled with pork meat and sweet turnip, a slight cinnamon flavour and rolled in bean curd skin and served with a delicate slightly sweet chili sauce. For main we ordered the Nyonya Rendang Chicken, a curry with a spicy dark coconut paste with kaffir lime leaves, with a side of blue rice (coconut rice with some blue colored rice) which was very interesting. We also tried Mee Siam, a rice vermicelli noodle dish with a spicy sauce made from candle nut, soy sauce, shrimp paste, tamarind, onion, brown sugar. It was a delicious well balanced meal. We finished the meal with lemon iced tea. Don’t forget to check out the gallery upstairs.
The Tamarind is a good tasting and reasonably priced restaurant and take away located on Scarborough Beach Road in Mount Hawthorn. The restaurant is promoted as serving Cambodian food, though you will find familiar Thai, Malaysian and Chinese dishes on the menu too. We used our Entertainment Card to get a discount, but we would go back again no problems.
Don’t go here expecting purely ‘Malaysian food’, which is a misnomer anyway, as food in Malaysia is derived from Chinese, Indian, Malay, Thai plus many other influences. Also don’t go here expecting a gourmet food experience. What you do get is friendly service, large serves and good food. This restaurant has recently moved from Riverton Forum, the food and staff are the same.