We had lunch at Brasserie de l’etoile. It’s a new french restaurant in the Avenues mall, phase II. The place looked and felt french, even the music played was perfecting the french mood.

However, The mood they were trying to set did not help my dish one bit. My dish was good, going by the Kuwaiti standards, but if I were to judge this restaurant and compare it to real french ones, I’d say they need to take a closer look at some of their dishes and concentrate on getting the flavors right.
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I went in with very low expectations, I expected a disappointing adaptation of yet another great book by Brown, if not his best book, and I think this was the only reason I came out not as disappointed as I should be.

I think the movie was entertaining and is likely to have legions of movie goers praising it for the coming weeks. It is fast paced and high on thrills. However, and just like it’s predecessor, The Da Vinci Code, the movie pales next to the book. There was no time in the movie to squeeze all the information needed, And I think with that pace they were going, the viewer couldn’t grasp how big of an issue things like: illuminati, anti matter and path of illumination really were.

Despite that, the movie surpassed my expectations and I liked it. If you haven’t read the book, or have read it a long time ago (just like myself) then you’re going to enjoy the movie.

Movie censoring: The movie wasn’t censored a lot, except for 1 or 2 key moments, where we were left looking at each other for an explanation.

I was recommended this Spa by Ansam, and since I’m making it my duty to find the best massage place in Kuwait, I went.

The place isn’t hard to find at all, it’s in Salmiya, gulf road, the right after Divas restaurant then the third building on the left. It’s a men’s Salon & Spa, haven’t tried one of those before. It isn’t big, the salon is upfront and the spa is in the back, however it is very nicely designed with a modern feel. The people working there and the reception was very nice and warm. Even when I asked about the possiblity of taking pictures they were all smiles and approved immediately (this isn’t the case most of the times with spas).
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Reading Intlxpatr & Mark’s posts about the newly opened restaurant, Smoke House, was enough to make me want to go there and experience it myself. Before going I asked a couple of friends about the place, and they all said it’s Ok. Nothing more and nothing less, the place is just ok. But I went anyway.

The place is small and had around 7 tables only. It’s in a hard to come across location location and is partially owned by an american (cool factor & authenticity factor). Unfortunately my experience wasn’t a good one. And Here is why:

The food was mediocre at BEST. Nothing special about the food at all:

1- The chicken wings’ (which is considered a specialty in this restaurant) presentation was horrible. The wings looked and tasted like they were cooked a couple of hours ago and then heated up in an oven then served.

2- Their smoke house burger was nothing special. The patty was too dry and the bun was too thick. Even my friend who had this burger a month ago said that it isn’t the same anymore.

3- The ribeye steak, my order, was recommended by the waitress as the house special dish, turned out like a fridays’ steak. I ordered it medium and got a well done.

The service:

The waitress was very nice, but I can’t say the same about the waiter nor the manager. The waiter couldn’t care less when I told him that the wings weren’t fresh, and when I told him I ordered a medium steak not a well done, he just smiled and left.

On our way out me and my friend had a little chat with the manager that went like this:

Friend: The chicken wings was different this time than the last time I was here.
Manager: No it’s the same.
Friend: No, I was here and my friends ordered the wings and it was different.
Manager: No, Thats what you think. I know it is the same.
Me: The wings weren’t fresh.
Manager: No they’re fresh. they were cooked at around 6pm only. (we were eating the wings at 8:30pm)
Friend: The food is different this time, even the burger! I ate here a month ago and everything was good!
Me: see this is my first time in this restaurant, so I don’t know if the way you cook has changed or not, but I just want to say that most of the food wasn’t good.
Manager: (in a very careless tone that lasted throughout the conversation) Listen, I know that my food hasn’t changed a bit, because I cook here, I made the recipes and the dishes and everything… I do everything here.
Friend: and we ate the food, so we know..
Manager: Yes the food I made.
Me: You know, you have an amazing way of arguing with the customers.

Thats when he retracted a bit, realized that he shouldn’t have argued so much, and said the ‘I will try and see what went wrong.. I appreciate your opinion..’ bla bla bla. Too little too late.

The hype surrounding this place was big, and the disappointment I felt, after eating the food and dealing with this disrespectful manager, was bigger.

Their location

A friend of mine recently told me about an asian restaurant, a sort of hole-in-the-wall kind of place. From the outside the place hardly looks like it’s worth it (shakla mayeswa baiza). The sign from the outside was plain old blah, it didn’t look inviting at all. Once we entered, we saw that its a small place with 4 places to sit (two 6 seaters and two 4 seaters). Later and after placing the orders, we had to share our table with a stranger coz we were sitting at a table for six, I didn’t want to relinquish the extra seats but it was hard saying no to a customer standing right on top of me, waiting for me to say yes to the waiter. You get the picture, the restaurant is small.. a la early bird.
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I went along with the family yesterday to Abdulwahab Restaurant. The place is bigger than I had in mind and roomier (o shar7) and in spite of being new, it wasn’t crowded, which is weird considering Kuwaitis’ love for new places.

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I’ve been hearing about this spa for a long time from friends, and as I was telling my friends this weekend that I needed a massage and that I probably will go to The Day Spa, which is my favorite massage place in all O the land, my friend Ban1 told me, for the 10th time, that I should consider going to the one in crown plaza hotel. He said that it is the best place in Kuwait. So, as a massage fan and more importantly as a blogger looking for good material for you readers, I went to Aquatonic Spa and took my camera with me.
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Zain Create have an offer for limited time, if you register before the 1st of april you’ll get KD 5.100 (thats 5 kds and a 100 fils) of credit to download songs off their music store. I went ahead an registered, it was an easy process and I got the promotional 5KDs credited to my Zain Create account. You should all register, there is no need to miss out on this one time deal.

Anyway, I looked around the site, then wanted to download something to try the service out. I went to the top 10 list and found that Fadhel Shaker’s new album is in the #1 spot (Not just that, He is #1 in the top songs, albums, and artists list!) so I went with Fadhel’s new album. I bought the album (10 tracks, each track costs 300fils. You can’t buy the whole album as of now, but it says in the FAQs section that the option will be available soon. It better be). I bought the album and am now listening to 2 of the songs.. the download rate is between 10kbps and 35kbps (I’m using ego 7.2).

I’m listening to Jowa Al Roh right now and the quality is superb. the song is 4:27 long, in MP3 format, 6.2MB, 192 Kbit/s. Obviously good quality. and comes with an ID3 tag with the picture of the album’s cover.

The whole site is very well designed and is easy to use. I love it.. but there is room for improvement. Hear me out if you have a say in this project:

1- I need to be able to tell which song is already downloaded. Like for example as I was downloading Fadhel’s songs, I lost track. There needs to be a sign or a label on the song which has been downloaded so i don’t download it again by mistake.

2- The lack of Mac software is not acceptable.

3- The song sampling is very fast, which I appreciate a lot, but sometimes the play button doesn’t work and I have to refresh a few times before I can start sampling the song.

4- I should be able to download the whole album as a package, coz it was a hassle downloading each track separately. I know it’s coming.. but still, it should be available from the start imo.

5- It says that once I download a song, I should receive an sms immediately, and yet, I downloaded 10 songs, wrote this post and still not a single sms.

I think the service is very good and that Zain did a great job with this whole thing.

Visit Zain Create and get the offer before it expires.

Update:

I was sent an email by Zain replying to the 5 points I wrote above. Here is their reply:

1-Noted will work on it you can check your downloads on my create section .

Finally , try out the streamed channels of Rotana( Audio & TV ) as well on the website & try to download the mobile application from web its compatible with Nokia & Sony Ericson symbian mobiles ,,, blackberry soon ….

Thanks Alia

We’ve been hearing a lot about this restaurant called Rice that opened recently in the avenues and we decided to give it a try.
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I was recommended this restaurant by a friend, and was very interested in trying it out since it specializes in chicken wings. I really like having chicken wings with it’s spicy buffalo sauce and thought I’d try it for dinner. I spent some time looking for this place, although I was told it’s near Sahran in Aljabriya, which is supposed to be very easy to find, I still managed to get lost.
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We went to the Butcher Shop in Avenues mall last saturday, and it was my first visit to Kuwait’s branch, I’ve been to the one in dubai numerous of times and used to like it at first. The one in Dubai started off strong with quality meat and started it down spiral only months after it’s opening.

I went to the one in Avenues coz my friends said that it’s good. They’ve tried it and they liked it.

We were 7 and we ordered 7 steaks, 5 T-Bones and 2 Rib eyes. one of them was to be cooked Medium-rare, 2 medium-wells and 3 mediums. The waitress was confused and we had to repeat the order multiple of times and she still did not get it right, so we asked her to retake the whole order and rewrite it. She was a mess.

The starters came and were superb. The prawns with cream and lemon were very good.

The main dishes, the steaks, came and were a joke. they were all overcooked. All shades of gray when we started to cut em and not a single medium in there. They messed up the whole order (well except the rare steak, coz it came out pretty rare). When we complained to the waiter(s) they all seamed to repeat one phrase, which was “this is our medium steaks in here.” The manager, who stood still and did not come even though he was looking directly at our table and hearing us, came to us after we asked to talk to him, he said the same thing too. He did not seem interested in our opinion nor in our dissatisfaction. Even after we got real angry he did not seem to be of much help and was annoyingly careless. He did however change 4 of our steaks in the end. (3ogob malawa3 chboodna)

The experience was an awful one. The manager needs to be changed coz he didn’t seem to know what he was doing. I wouldn’t go there anymore, not only because they did not know the difference between a medium and a well-done, but because the service, the manager, the chef and the quality of their meats are of low standards. charging 9+ KDs for this kind of steaks is a rip off too. If you’re in a mood for good steaks treat yourselves to Terrace Grill in J.W. Mariott’s or Gaucho’s instead.

My friend sent me a one dozen sample of basbosas from their newly launched home business, Lgaima sweets, for me to try and review. Let me start off this review by saying that I’m not a fan of the traditional Basbosa, and that was one of the main reasons why I loved my mother’s ‘Basbosa wanabee‘, because she doesn’t use coconut in it. I’m not a fan of coconuts.. I loathe Bounty the chocolate bar.
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We got an e-mail from Alf Laila where she kindly wrote a Dean & Deluca review for us to publish. Here is what she thought of the place:

“Wanting to try out the all too hip Dean and DeLuca café in the Avenues my family and I went there for a light early dinner. While I’m impressed with their collection of caviar, honey and marinades, I have but one phrase regarding their café: ALLA YZEED IL NI3MA. (May God increase our blessings).

Unfortunately I don’t recall the exact names of the orders and I do apologize for the poor quality of the photos as they were taken from my phone. My order was a goat cheese and avocado sandwich, both ingredients that I like. But, there was way too much of the goat-cheese-avocado mixture inside the sandwich and I had to leave some of it out. The picture shows what was leftover of my sandwich. One of us also ordered some sort of chicken sandwich and please do speak up if you’ve seen this 7araka before but I don’t recall ever going to a restaurant where they actually left lemon peel INSIDE a sandwich! Again refer to the picture. Last but not least, the pizza was not made of bread that was typical of pizza bread but rather it looked more like pita (Lebanese) bread and it kind of looked like hospital food because it was so thin. All in all the café was a disappointment and we decided not to stay there for desert. I did decide to go again but I warned my cousin this time against eating there. We ordered two coffees and a muffin and when we finally asked for the bill we received a stack of maybe three or four bills stapled together and on top of them it said on a small piece of paper a price of a little over 14KD. I was astounded because there was no way a Chai Latte, a Café Au Lait, and a Blueberry muffin would cost that much! It turned out the register was broken. Our actual bill was for only KD 3. That, I can forgive because a broken register is an understandable glitch in the beginning of a restaurant’s operation. Also, in their defense I have to say that the waiters were polite and friendly and our waiter was very apologetic about the mistake in the bill.
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As promised in my previous ‘23 Hours in Bahrain‘ post, here is a review of my visit to Bahrain’s BanyanTree Spa last weekend.

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This is the guy I promised you guys to post about, His name is Abu Abdullah and he makes his living out of doing this home delivery kind of barbecuing. He brings all of his tools, meats and stuff and does the barbeque right infront of you.

His grills includes Reyash (lamb chops), Kabab, Sheesh 6awooq (the chicken in the picture), sho2af (tikka), and Arayes (the sandwich in the picture below. It is minced meat+onion+tomatos+cheese, all sandwiched and grilled together).
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I heard and read a lot of raving reviews and praises from bloggers and friends alike about The Early Bird, and wanted to go there for a long time now but the restaurant’s location and it’s opening times didn’t make it easy for me to try it out sooner, but thanks to bu9ale7’s persistence, we finally managed to pay a visit this weekend.
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I went to Prime & Toast with a couple of friends the other day based on the many praises I’ve heard about the breakfast at this place. I’ve been to the place once before for dinner and I liked it, but since I don’t like breakfasts much, I went with low expectations.
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My friend bought me a dozen of this vanilla ice cream some time ago for me to try. I did try them and took pictures then forgot to tell you guys about them. The ice cream is very good and the portion although small, very satisfying. It’s available in Sultan center (I just called my friend to ask about the price and he said “I forgot how much exactly but i think they’re 250 fils a piece”).

The mix totally hit the spot.

Blue Bell

My cousin recommended this new restaurant and said it specializes in Kuwaiti food. I gave it a try.

It arrived after 45 minutes as promised. I ordered 1 Muchboos Laham and 1 Shabzi stew. Speaking of shabzi.. I’ve been looking around Kuwait for a good marag shabzi but I haven’t come across a really good one yet. All of the shabzis I’ve tried weren’t so good.. any recommendations??

Anyway, The packaging was nice and the food looked very appetizing (much better than the pictures you’re seeing).
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Usually whenever we want some iranian food delivered to our house we order from Marafi’s, But since 9k2hn was telling us about this Babak restaurant and how well is their presentation, we figured we’d order from them this time and give them a try.

I was expecting the packaging to be slighly better than Kabab Alhejja’s.. you know the white foam boxes wrapped in strings. But this one went well above my expectations. It was very nicely packaged. I leave you with the pictures now.

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