Nasi and Mee is a pan Asian restaurant that is setup on the 80ft Road in Koramangala. It is near the Maharaja signal, adjacent to Barista and opposite Swensens. This restaurant opened up sometime mid 2015.

I was lucky to have come to this place as me and my friend had originally planned on visiting some other restaurant. After my friend reached the restaurant that we had originally planned, she remembered that she had been there earlier. So, in a quest to try out newer places, we tried to find a replacement restaurant that both of us hadn’t been to, in the past! It was about 9PM on a Friday night and most places are usually bustled with people 😦 And, we were really keen on getting some good food, fast, but not fast food! See the difference ? 😉

I had seen a lot of positive chatter on Nasi and Mee in the Social media and we decided to head here as we were very close to it anyway!

As we entered the place, we were told to wait for 5 minutes. There is a little bench at the entrance( on the outside though ), where we parked our butts. The manager was kind enough to give us an assurance that we wouldn’t have to wait for long, as a table was already at the billing stage. This was reassuring and this kind of customer service helps! If that hadn’t been told to us, we would have probably started looking at other restaurants close by. And with the number of restaurants in the vicinity, it’s quite easy to find one! The wait time gave us a chance to read through a few popular reviews on Zomato, of this place. We were trying to find out what’s best here. The original purpose of checking Zomato was to be able to decide on what we were going to order, without having to waste after we sit on the dinner table. We also didn’t wanna go out of here unsatisfied, and that too by making poor choices. The Malaysian, Singaporean and Thai cuisines are new to us!

Ambience

The restaurant has a rustic theme. The tables are wooden and they’re not exactly flat, which is obviously a problem when the food is placed on it. There were several instances where the glasses could have toppled over!! Pieces of wood in horizontal stripes collectively become a table. The lighting is dim and they have some really nice incandescent bulbs. On one side of the seating, you have a huge glass pane, through which you can see the traffic. On the other side, you have 2 walls, one with lighting that says N and M and other with a drawing of a beautiful hen! They have a few Thumbs up and Mirinda bottles as part of their decor! Wonder who came up with that 🙂

Menu design

The menu was perfect in all aspects. They have a separate alcohol menu. The food cum mocktail menu was a 10/10 in terms of usability!! what also helped was that some of the dishes had a chef recommendation logo, next to it. It pays to pick the dishes that have that logo. You’re less likely to go wrong with those.

Beverages

We chose a Chendol drink and Lemongrass cooler. These were the drinks that were mostly what people were talking about.

The Chendol(usually written as Cendol), is a coconut milk based drink with jelly noodles in it. This is a Chef recommended drink! The first sip of it, we fell in love with it! When the drink was served, the noodles were floating, but when we stirred it a bit, the noodles settled at the bottom of the glass and almost died of drowning 😛 . It needed daddy to suck it out of the straw. The drink comes with a colossal straw. You wonder why ? Cos, it’s science. You didn’t have to struggle to get the noodles through the straw. Amazing? Yes, we were amazed with this. Get us the next drink, will ya ?

The Lemongrass cooler was tangy and came with a little bowl of sugar syrup. We had to pour the whole thing into the drink to get some sweetness! The drink was pretty good. Not something that blew our socks off.
This is also a Chef recommended drink!

For the first time, I felt my friend picked the better of the 2 drinks 😦

Starter

We picked Thai Chilly Prawns for starters.

When it was served to us, I thought that the quantity of the dish was less. That was the first thought that came to my mind. What I then thought of, was that the color of the prawns was very light( no colors added? and/or too bland? ). I couldn’t wait to dig in, to find out!

The prawns were actually very low on heat and spice, but then came our hero to the rescue ; Sambal sauce, which is made from chili peppers ,garlic & ginger, shallot, scallion(green onion), sugar, lime juice, and vinegar. This sauce was an absolute hit with us! We teamed it with everything we could and the food tasted brilliant 😉

We also had 2 other sauces.
The dark XO sauce was pretty good as well, but no where close to the Sambal sauce!
The other sauce was a chilly sauce, which was awful.
I had to ask a couple of waiters for more explanation on the sauces, but the waiters seemed to have no idea what that was and/or didn’t know how to explain it in English. That showed that they weren’t trained well enough!

Main course

The main course is divided into 2 parts: Nasi And Mee.
1. Nasi (pronounced nah-see) in Malay is rice.
2. Mee is a dish containing noodles

I don’t eat gluten, so we preferred a Nasi!
What’s better than Nasi Goreng? 🙂 It’s a rhetorical question!

Nasi Goreng is a fried rice. It was served along with krupuk(deep fried cracker),cucumber slices and a tiny omlette 🙂 We customized the dish and added chicken to it. You can choose prawns, chicken or fish and of-course vegetarian! There were 2 sticks of chicken kababs. The kababs were dry and tasteless. Again, the sambal sauce came to the rescue! The rice is actually cooked in fish oil, only if you choose a non vegetarian option. Vegetarian people can feel safe 🙂 The rice tasted very good, but had very few chicken pieces in it. I guess the 2 kabab sticks were all that you’d get in terms of chicken. The dish costed about 350 bucks. 2 shared it and the quantity was good for about 1.7 people(not exactly 2).

Dessert

We picked Ais Kacang. The dessert looked freaking awesome when it came to our table. I hadn’t seen anything more colorful, ever 🙂 This dessert revolves around shaved ice and red beans. Red beans actually tasted quite good in a dessert :). It has fake pomegranate seeds as well, which tasted very good. The rice noodles are also nice to have. There were peanuts as well, which looked like a misfit! The ice has some sort of a cream in it, which is what made the ice taste so good! But, the shaved ice was so hard, it was tough to get through this. We gave up after a few bites( may be at 60% completion ).
After a few bites into this, the bowl was full of green colored liquid! It didn’t look anywhere close to what it looked at the start! At that point, I felt like the dessert was a rip off of the green ice gola 🙂 Full points for creativity on this dish! It very innovative and unlike anything I had before as a dessert 🙂

Couple of pictures shot by my friend and edited by me:

Bill

I felt that it was a little high on the pricing. What we had should have costed us, may be, 1100 incl of taxes ? But, we paid 1313!

Areas of Improvement by Butter theory

The restaurant has ticked off several boxes in terms of what one expects from a restaurant. But there are a few things that they could improve.
* The staff(particularly waiters) should be trained better. They have no idea about the food, sauces etc.
* The prices should be worked upon. It is slightly on the higher side. Either increase the portion sizes or reduce prices!
* The tables are not flat. Things can fall off!

I may come back here for some more pan Asian food . I may!