Food My Foot

I had breakfast at one of the cafes in KLIA yesterday morning. Fried yellow noodles (RM8.00) with fried egg on top (RM2.00), plus a mug of cappuccino (RM4.90).

The blooming noodles were too dry. Did I order noodles or plastic strings? Tasteless, boring and as empty as the kind I once sold at the canteen of Sekolah Rendah Laksamana in Kota Tinggi for thirty cents per bowl full. At least mine was generous with siew pak choy and bean sprouts (the kids hated vege though..). Just like the type sold at school canteens, what I had just now was probably fried with garlic, soy sauce and pretty much nothing else. Not even some imagination.

The cappuccino? Horrible! It tasted like my kid’s milk with maybe just a baby-pinch of coffee. The taste of coffee was very instant and distant. Like a yummy dream that evaporated away the moment you wake up and realise you are not Angelina Jolie and Yamtuan is after all Yamtuan (not that I am complaining).

My grouch is not the price.

I understand that we customers are to help the shop pay for its rental, taxes and other overheads. So, overpricing the food, to a certain degree is understandable. I am not exactly delighted, but ok lah, can lah.

But the lack of quality I find absolutely unacceptable.

Here you are, making efforts so tourists come in droves. Here you are, listing our variety of food as one of the attractions. And there it is, the café at KLIA, no less, the very entry/exit point of the country. Wouldn’t it be nice if the food served at KLIA is so awesome good that people would drive down to the airport just for say… its famous unrivalled fried noodles? Wouldn’t it be even wonderfully good that tourists could have one last fling with our foodilicious delicacies just before they leave the country? And how they crave for more and kick themselves for not having chosen MAS to fly home with because MAS might serve more of that yummy Malaysian food too?

I don’t know how much a kg of mee kuning would cost. I know mee hoon would be RM1.50 per kg. Say you want to fry 10 kg. So 10 bags would be RM15.00. If you throw in a kg of prawns it would be an additional RM15.00. Chicken would be about RM15 per bird, and that’s a lot of chicken, I am telling you. Bean sprouts RM2.00 would be a basketful already. Kuchai RM2.00 will get you a whole field. Total cost = RM49 for 10kg of mee hoon fried with loads of condiments equivalent to maybe 100 bowls? Then you maintain your price of RM8.00 per bowl. Your Return on Investment is in the 7th bowl already. By the 20th bowl, you can pay your staff bonuses i tell you. By the 80th bowl, my man, you can go do the hajj. So why compromise on the quality?

In the food industry, I believe you are only bartering the forms of rezeki. The food you sell becomes rezeki to those who eat it, and the money they pay you is your rezeki. Don’t lah play-play with matters of rezeki…

(Disclaimer: I know the pasta, sandwiches, cakes and pastries sold at KLIA are not bad at all, but halloo… I am talking local food. Spaghetti may be local food to us Johoreans, but to the ehem… common people of Malaysian, it is foreign, so doesn’t count.)