the Gump has descended!

Obviously a shameless effort to capitalize on a popular movie, Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. is the latest franchise to arrive on Malaysian shores. Taking a good idea from the movie - shrimp is the fruit of the sea - Bubba Gump is a good old fashioned American style restaurant that emphasizes on... what else, shrimp!

Alice and I went there for our anniversary on a Saturday night. The place was quite packed and we couldn't get reservations in time, so we had to do a walk-in. The front door guys told us it would most likely take about 30-45 minutes, took down my number and promised to call me when they had a table free. We returned after 30 minutes and sure enough, the guy was just about to dial my number as a table had just been freed up.

So far, so good, the restaurant takes up two floors in a section of the Curve. For the uninitiated, it's on the 1st floor, opposite Marche, although with the bright neon lights it's kinda hard to miss it.

The menu does have a whole lot of shrimp dishes, but also fish, beef and chicken. We had the Run Across America sampler, the Bourbon Street Barramundi and a side caesar and clam chowder.

Sorry, no pictures until I can get my digital camera! Blame HP imaging for putting a crappy camera in that model of phone. Bah.

The Run Across America sampler was rather huge, it had a selection of several of their different appetizers, including fried shrimp, hush pups (kinda like a croquette made of shrimp, fish, potato and corn), buffalo chicken strips, chilled shrimp and a great spinach & artichoke dip with corn chips for dipping. The dip was excellent and so was the shrimp, but the buffalo strips were just a tad too sour and spicy, they kinda overdid it with the sauce.

Bourbon Street Barramundi came with two decent sized pieces of the fish, on mashed potatoes and with a Bourbon-based creamy sauce and grilled shrimp. It was excellent for the most part except for the fish being slightly fishy in the middle. Could not fault anything else about it though, as the dish tasted excellent and was filling (and I love mashed potatoes!)

The side caesar and clam chowder was a big, big surprise. The side caesar salad was as large as most other large caesar salads at other places. I don't even want to know about what the regular one looks like. It was plain, though, but tasted good. The clam chowder was very good, bursting with clams and potatoes and goodness, and they even served good crackers to go with the chowder.

Drinks were innovative but limited in selection. We had a mango sparkler (sort of like mango juice with soda) and something called a spotted lemonade, it was lemonade with either strawberries or blueberries. Of course, we had strawberries with it.

After all that, dessert was out of the question, so strawberry shortcake will have to wait until next time.

While we were waiting for our food, one of the waiters came and entertained us with trivia questions from Forrest Gump. The waiter then went off to check on our food, good service. In fact, this was one of the very few times I felt compelled to actually tip the waiter on top of paying the service charge, just because his service was excellent.

The atmosphere is quite casual and fun, rather ala Chili's and Friday's. They have the movie showing on screens and all the decor is inspired by the movie itself. Even the paper they serve the food on is a fictitious paper from the movie. They even have a souvenir shop just outside the restaurant selling t-shirts, magnets and stuff related to the movie and the restaurant. The glasses are nice, you can buy them from the shop or in the restaurant, just with paying a bit extra you can bring home your glass that you had your cocktail in :)

All in all, it was a pleasant experience despite the crowds (once inside, it didn't feel crowded for a single moment) with great food, and good service. Since Friday's has gone down the drain, and Chili's is getting rather mediocre as well, this is probably my new favorite place for casual dining. The bill for both of us came up to RM127, pretty okay since we kinda splurged on the food.

P/S: while we were there, we saw the serving of onion rings. It was enough to make me salivate. A whole stack of large, thick cut onion rings piled almost a foot high. Will try it out when I go again.

Overall, I'll give it an 8.3/10 and I'll definitely go back again, hopefully before it starts going downhill like most things that are Malaysian-run...!