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By Mihar Dias (C) Copyright January 2023
Bangsar Shopping Centre Bakery and Cafe located at the main lobby of the premier mall in the Bangsar Damansara area serves excellent and tasty nasi lemak in large pyramid-shaped banana leaf packages every morning for years at affordable prices.
You'll have to try it to know the difference. It's not like any other nasi lemak bungkus you are likely to get on the roadside anywhere in Kuala Lumpur.
It is supplied by a resident of the DBKL flats in Bangar Utama a couple of kilometres away from BSC.
The nasi is really "lemak", a full-bodied 60 grams helping of rich local starchy rice enriched with original coconut milk.
In every package you'll get one hard boiled egg, crunchy ikan bilis or anchovies, fried peanuts and a hearty serving of well prepared chilli sauce with just the right amount of tamarind juice, salt sugar, caramalised shallots and that mandatory pinch of "belacan" or fermented prawn paste plus enough dried ground chilies to give it that extra kick!
When you mix the rice with the chilli sauce and then take your first bite you'll forget all the other nasi lemak bungkus you have bought on the roadside all your life.
This nasi lemak has class.
Anyway we drove out of our house with friends to have our weekend fix of nasi lemak on Saturday, a day before Chinese New Year at leisure because we thought it would be a quiet day at BSC since most people would have left for their family homes out of KL to be in time for a reunion dinner that evening.
We were wrong.
When we got there just before 10 the place was crowded. We saw every table except one full of Malays and some ethnic Indians had banana leaf with traces of rice on plates left in front of them smiling happily. We guessed they must have enjoyed the nasi lemak ahead of us.
We found one unoccupied table and squeezed in. Our neighbour who took a ride with us had gone ahead to get the nasi bungkus for everyone.
She returned to the table empty handed. "Sorry guys nasi lemak is sold out!" In fact, she was told it was sold out during the first hour after the cafe opened at 8 am.
We were late and felt terribly disappointed.
The moral of the story is just because it's Chinese New Year's eve it does not mean that other ethnic groups besides Chinese would not be at BSC early for the famous nasi lemak bungkus on a Saturday morning.
But we also have a suspicion that the vendor must have supplied a little less quantity since many would not visit BSC on Saturday before lunar new year. This proves to be a false assumption. We were informed that the vendor provides the same number of nasi bungkus daily.
So, we sat there and had caffe latte instead, missing our morning fix for nasi lemak regretting that we did not make an effort to be there at 8 am like the early birds before us.
At the same we thought that we ought to write a complaint to the management and ask them why they did not anticipate the extra high demand on that Saturday morning when everyone came out from their borrows like rabbits in this Year of the Rabbit, looking for their fix for nasi lemak bungkus.
I suppose this serves as a reasonable complaint to the management of BSC Bakery and Cafe giving notice that we really missed our nasi lemak.
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