A Shocking RM436 Meal for Nasi Kandar at Hameediyah!!!!

Yes, you heard it right. You read it right. This was the amount of money that we paid for Nasi Kandar meal for 14 persons at Hameediyah Restaurant at Campbell St yesterday. This is so far ... the most expensive, the most outrageous, the most unreasonable, the most ridiculous, the most blood sucking and the most disgraceful meal we ever have in our own Penang Island. Yes, it is the same Penang that we are so proud of and eager to promote more aggressively to locals and also visitors from outstation and abroad. But with this shameful experience we had, we felt sorry that the food paradise image Penang proudly claim will go down the drain because of unscrupulous businessmen.

Yes, we call them unscrupulous because of the business model they practise is to "chop" you hard right on the first visit. We were the host to a group of visitors from the recently opened hotel in Penang together with some media invited by the hotel itself as part of the effort to experience staying at the hotel and enjoying Penang food. Is this not the good opportunity to present Penang at its best to these group of people? We have the reason to believe we were not the first to be hit by this "kena conned" feeling. We believe there might be more who have experienced this incident but could not get the message through. So PenangTuaPui have this experience first hand and we want to bring this straight to the point.

Before we begin, pardon our language for using the superlatives and also some "symbols" for the frustration and the anger we had after taking this meal. If you have noticed, our recent tones and harshness in reviews have reduced considerably because we believe in making a win-win situation for the consumers and restaurants so that both the benefit the best in a symbiotic environment. But what we encountered and had to pay was beyond our wildest imagination that we want to ban this place for good.

Hey, we do not have the intention to kill the business here. It is the restaurant itself that wants to kill the business by ensuring no returning customers. If you want continuous businesses especially the ones that we are going to bring in more, you have to know how to please your customers by not chopping off their heads to make money but make them pleased and happy dining at your place so that they can be satisfied customers when leaving your premise. The words of mouth is a good referral to bring in more happy customers. The opposite is equally true so please bear that in mind.

As we were in a large group of 14 people, we thought it will be easier to serve in dishes than individuals as the media can snap the photos for their review write ups. Terribly wrong strategy and the beginning of a disastrous meal to come. We told them we had 14 people but the dishes that came could easily feed 20 ~22 and yet the supervisor kept saying "You can finish it, no problem." .. Finish it, my @$$. Just by looking at the portions on the table, even a small kid can tell it was too much yet they keep serving more until we had to put the stop and insisted them to take back some of the dishes because we really believed we could not finish it and it would be a complete waste! We kept saying we had 14 and they served more than that number and our hard headed, lousy supervisor kept saying can finish one. !@#$%! stupid.

It was the right decision to push some dishes back or else we would be paying at least RM700 for the meals, which was just !@#%$ crazy. We asked for 2 plates of large prawns to be taken back and each prawn actually cost RM20! That is just !@#$% unbelievable! The remaining plate of prawn that we had cost us RM120 a plate and with that amount of money, we could simply have much, much, much better dishes in a Chinese Restaurant. To make it worst, the supervisor kept insisting we could not take it back because it had been cooked for us. Plain stupid. Was he really so naive to think that we have no idea what they do with those dishes? They could just put it back to the big pot and re-heat and someone else takes it.

Since we were hosting some guests from the media, we actually requested the owner to come over to explain the dishes so that they can jot down notes and information about the dishes. The owner sent the lousy supervisor over who did nothing but just walked around telling things that we were not interested to know. Please, your job is to explain to us about the dishes that we were eager to know and not about where to get the best tambun biscuits in Penang. We already know that, you ID 10T!

Also, if we want to pay for that amount of money, we would expect a much better service from these people to justify that (although it is hard to swallow it). We were asking for plates while sorting out the disagreement in the dishes served and that too take them some time to get it done. Most of the time, they would nod and say "OK" but even after few times of requesting, no sign of results can be seen. Even towards the end of the meal when we requested for the bill, it took like forever to see the damage we had to pay which the moment we saw the shocking numbers, blood started boiling with steam rushing to the top.

This was going to be the first and the last time that we would ever step into this place and the only time that we will ever bring our guests to this blood sucking restaurant. We were horribly disappointed to have introduced this so called one of the oldest restaurants in Penang to our guests and if they continue to choose working in this model, we believe it can potentially hurt the Penang tourism business due to exorbitant charges for the nasi kandar meal.
As part of the effort to promote Penang Food, we spread the message to visitors in Penang that nasi kandar is a must try item yet with what these people doing to the guests, we need to re-think if we should be promoting that, especially Hameediyah Restaurant at Campbell Street.
For those who want to know the itemized bill, here is it...