With Hokkien favourite Hong Ngek and dry curry noodles specialist Sin Hoy How swarming with office workers on their lunch breaks, we decided to pay the quieter LOKL Coffee Co nearby a second visit. During our maiden trip to the Melbourne-style Tun HS Lee café late last year, we stumbled upon LOKL’s putu mayam toastie and came away smitten enough to include the reinvented street dessert on our list of 2012’s best eats. That was about as good as it got.
Returning to present day, the messy pulled beef burger with cheese and Hainanese meatloaf we ordered impressively arrived in a little over five minutes. The burger’s liberal amount of slow cooked shredded beef in a masak kicap-like dark sauce was succulent if a tad overseasoned and the buns soft but overbuttered, leading us to the conclusion that the dish would be best served without the optional extra cheese. We reckon a side of chips would have made up for the pedestrian, haphazardly assembled salad as well.
The ensuing Hainanese meatloaf – essentially a fried sandwich stuffed with chicken, chestnuts and prawns – was more hit than miss, but we were left hankering for more of the tantalising filling, a result of the disproportionate bread-to-stuffing ratio.
In addition to its putu mayam toastie, the Cheryl Samad-owned establishment has also received plaudits for its local coffee. We found the signature kopi susu to be satisfyingly strong with a good consistency, but with a price almost double that of the many surrounding coffee shops, we expected the cuppa to comfortably blow its rivals out of the water. It didn’t.
For afters, we went with the decadent chocolate brownie, which came with a chunky peanut butter topping that inexplicably wasn’t part of the menu’s description.
With its charming décor and cosy ambience, LOKL Coffee Co decidedly offers a hipper and more comfortable alternative to Old KL’s various old eateries and restaurants. The food, though, still has some way to go before reaching the bar set by the putu mayam toastie’s gold standard.