Kelantan Delights

There were good reasons why Kelantan Delights was voted Malaysia's "Best Malay Restaurant 2005-2006" by Halal Journal. Great food, unique choices, reasonable pricing, professional service and good ambience were among them. Since it first started as a foodcourt outlet in 1997 and later graduated as a full-fledge restaurant in Suria KLCC from 2001, Kelantan Delights has not looked back. Today, at its new outlet at Sooka Sentral - next to KL Sentral, Klang Valley's transportation hub - Kelantan Delights still serves marvellous exotic cuisine.

The restaurant prides itself on serving authentic Kelantan and southern Thailand culinary wonders. Kelantan Delights offers a wide variety of local cuisine with distinct tastes and flavours, different from other Malaysian dishes, featuring mainstays such as fenugreek seeds, tamarind skin, galangal and lemon grass.

Kelantan Delights is a place you want to bring your foreign visiting friends to, for a delicious taste of good local food. Prices are reasonable too and with warm and sophisticated decor featuring modern wood furniture, Kelantan Delights is definitely top on many recommended lists.

Kelantan Delights is the only one local restaurant which serves Malay food which categorized in five stars. The owner of this restaurant, Juhaidi Yean Abdullah was graduated from University Malaya in Literature and Social Science in 1979. Later, he further study in University of Tsukuba Japan for two years which sponsored by Monbussho scholarship (Ministry of Education, Japan), which totally different from the food business.

He noticed a huge vacuum in the local restaurants such as Thai, Italian, Indian, French, Chinese and Japanese, but there were no such restaurants for Malay food. Actually, he noticed it after he interviewed Dato Zakiah (on that time he still works as reporters for NST newspapers) which told him that there are no Malay restaurants in the five-star location. Then, he decided to do something about it and opened Kelantan Delights at Suria KLCC 10 years ago (1997).

On that time, Malaysia was in recession season. People are afraid to take risk for invested in such a huge number of money. He believes that there is a good potential for doing business in KLCC and started to find the fund for setting up the business. Fortunately, he get the fund from Tun Mohd Hanif Omar, ex-Chief of Malaysia Police as the good relationship with him. That fund became the earlier capital to start up for the business. With the capital, approximately RM300, 000 he opened Kelantan Delights in KLCC.

He got the negative perception from people that the nasi dagang cannot sell in KLCC which they assume as the world-standard places. But all the perception is wrong because the restaurant was hit and proved that there was a market for up market Malay restaurants. But, due to cost problem, the lease cost is very high, Kelantan Delights has closed.

After that, Juhaidi reopened his restaurant at Sooka Sentral, which just beside KL Sentral. It is the great choice he has made because firstly, he has been able to open a much bigger restaurant compare when he open it at Suria KLCC. At 4,300 sq feet, the Kelantan Delights at Sooka Sentral is two-and-half times bigger than the one in Suria KLCC and can fit almost 230 people in the restaurant and have 20 employees which include waiter, waitress, and cashier and administration staffs. The location of new Kelantan Delights is strategic and is cinch to getting there. The best way is to hop onto the LRT. Customer can have a seat overlooking the balcony area and get great view of the LRT coming and going. Kelantan delights famous with its special dishes, nasi dagang and nasi kerabu.