“Finished or not finished?” (Are you all out of x item?)

“Big water, one (or two or three).” (I’d like a big bottle of water (or two or three).)

Adding flourishes, like whether I should back into the parking space, whether something that’s unavailable today might be available tomorrow, or what brand of bottled water are sometimes too confusing for both me and whoever it is I’m talking to.  And if we’re speaking to each other on the phone, all bets are completely off.  I could ask for internet service and end up being a foster mom to a box turtle.

An oeuf brouille in port wine sauce, or basically, the most decadent little runny egg number dotted with black truffles

But perhaps the most surprising turn of events from my inability to grasp Malay English came in the days leading up to New Year’s Eve.  My cousin and his partner were coming to town, and the hubby and I were dying for an evening out with grown-ups, our first since the Gravy Baby was born.  I’d also been dying to try Cilantro, a restaurant just around the corner from our house that’s been receiving international acclaim ever since its grand reopening just a few months ago.  The chef is Japanese, and he makes French food with a Japanese perspective.

A few days before New Year’s Eve, I called Cilantro to beg for a reservation.  Getting a table at one of the most sought-after places in town would be a long shot. The holidays had crept up on the hubby and me, and with a rotating door of visitors, I’d barely had time to finish with one set of family or friends before the next group was upon us.  The maitre’d confirmed my suspicions — the restaurant was fully booked, but he would happily add me to the waitlist.  I agreed, thinking that I’d just go find someplace else anyway.

I hung up the phone, utterly convinced that Cilantro was going to have to wait for another day.  Five minutes later, the phone rang; it was the maitre’d at Cilantro again.  “I’m pleased to inform you that you have been taken off the waiting list and that we have a table available for you at 7:00pm on December 31st.”

Pan-seared Hokkaido scallop with — you guessed it — a little fan of black truffle waving hello at me

What?  I’m sure the ink had barely dried on the waiting list before I’d been taken off it.  I knew better than to question him, though, and I’m not sure that, between my total confusion and the heavily accented English on the other end of the phone that any sort of explanation would have been futile. I did, however, ask about the menu, and the maitre’d mumbled that it was a set menu.  Was it the same choice of set menu available on the website?  Yes, yes, he assured me.

The night of our dinner arrived just two short days later.  At the restaurant, the printed menus at each of our places left a lot of questions up in the air, so we summoned our server over to the table.  The dialogue that followed was perplexing, to say the least.

“What is the Wagyu Beef Rossini?” my cousin asked.

“It’s grilled…beef…Rossini style,” responded the server.  Okay, so this was not the most illuminating answer, but my cousin forged onward anyway.

“How is the chicken main course prepared?”

The server shrugged.  “I don’t know, I haven’t seen it yet.”  All of us around the table exchanged worried glances as the server backed away from our table to ask about the chicken dish.  She returned a few minutes later, looking confident.  “It’s a chicken, and under the skin, we stuff black truffles.  Then we put the whole chicken piece in a bag, vacuum it, and soak it in water until it’s cooked.”

I piped up at this point. “Oh, you mean sous vide?”  The server nodded triumphantly, even though she had just described the technique in a way that made it sound completely unappetizing.  But I had to give her some credit.  If I weren’t such a junkie when it comes to food competition shows, I’d never had known what it was called, either.

Left: the menu required a deep knowledge of French cuisine; top right: black truffle butter greeted us when we arrived; bottom right: the cool, modern interior of Cilantro

Still, at arguably one of the best restaurants in Malaysia, we were having a fair share of misfires.  My cousin also asked if there was a sommelier in-house.  A bunch of whispering in Malay ensued between a couple of servers, and finally one of them told my cousin, “Yes, we have a sommelier, but if you would like someone to talk to you about the wine, we have another person who can do that for you.”

Uhh…err?  Isn’t that what a sommelier does?

Eventually, we picked our main courses and a bottle of wine, but still none of us knew what lay ahead of us.  The first course arrived: a poached lobster dish with delicate stalks of baby asparagus topped with black truffle shavings.  On our table already were little pots of black truffle-specked butter, so I commented aloud at the fortuity of having black truffles in both my butter and on my lobster.

“Why yes,” said the server, as if I’d been asleep at the wheel all night.  “Tonight’s menu is a seven-course dinner featuring black truffles.”

Okay.  At this point, we’d been in the restaurant well over a half-hour, and this was the first we’d heard about the dinner being black-truffle themed.  Not only was it black-truffled themed, but for the next two hours, every single plate that came to our table was covered in black truffles.  The meal that I had anxiously fretted over, from the price of the meal (RM 340, a veritable fortune by Malaysian standards) to the apparent lack of knowledge demonstrated by the servers, quickly became not only a triumph, but a pretty good value, too, considering the sheer expense of that many truffles.

Wagyu beef Rossini, a steak topped with a thick slab of foie gras and served with delicate whipped potatoes

The whopper of a surprise came when the Beef Rossini arrived, and a huge slab of quivering foie gras sat atop it.  I guess I just don’t know enough food terms, because the fact that there was foie sitting atop this beautifully cooked piece of steak totally had escaped me.  As it turns out, that’s exactly what Rossini is: black truffle sauced beef with foie gras.  Ahh, amazing.

I lapped up every single delicious course at Cilantro.  The Japanese-infused French teemed with sophistication, and each dish was delicately balanced.  The soba noodles in a black truffle cream sauce had all the richness of a French sauced dish but the lightness, too, known in Japanese cuisine.  The egginess of the ouef brouille reminded me of a decadent chawan mushi (steamed Japanese egg custard) but also of the eggy custard that binds together a really rich quiche.  As I savored bite after bite of this incredible meal, the “Malaysia — Truly Asia” moments we’d had in communicating earlier that evening became part of the charm.  We compared our experience with what it might have been had the same dinner happened in the US, where we’d be reminded at every single turn of the evening that what we were eating was rare and magical and special and, clearly, expensive.  Here, at this unassuming, beautiful restaurant in KL, it almost seemed like a quiet understatement.  Of course you’re supposed to have black truffles on everything.  We’re at the best restaurant in Malaysia.  On New Year’s Eve.  What else would there be?

I wouldn’t have had it any other way, that’s for sure.

Cilantro | at the Micasa All Suite Hotel, 368B Jalan Tun Razak | Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia