Back in the days when I was a little boy, or even when I was in high school, a trip to Pizza Hut was a quite a big deal. It was, at the time, our version of fine dining.
Fast forward some 20 odd years, I can now afford food that are priced a bit higher, but Pizza Hut still always give me that warm and fuzzy feeling whenever I pay a visit there. There are arguments that Italian restaurants in hotels serve better pizzas, but I think those arguments is invalid, Pizza Hut is still the place that offers value for money and pizzas in the taste that we grow up with.
Pizza Hut at Kota Damansara, Kim, KY & Haze + beautifulnara & wife
Furthermore, it is also a place to meet up with a group of friends and family to share a dinner without worrying about budget, dress code, or if we are being too loud in a make pretend “Italian” place. It is down to earth and unpretentious, just the way we like it.
Earlier this week, I had a chance to become one of the first group of people to taste Pizza Hut’s latest product – the Chunky Loaded Pizza.
Pizza Hut Chunky Loaded Pizza – with 10 layers of ingredients
The chunky loaded pizza is really something, there are 10 layers of ingredients in all, from bottom up:
Kim, KY, & Citygal enjoying pizza & chicken wings
The pizza takes a cue from it’s Italian cousin, the layering theme of lasagna. The result is one of the best pizzas from Pizza Hut that I’ve tried, true story!
Now many have complained that the pizzas here often has a crust that can be too thick, there’s no such issue at all for the chunky loaded, the crust is thin and crunchy instead. The combination of cheese, tortilla, vege, and all the other layers of goodness worked well together to give a hearty pizza that was delicious and left us asking for more. It was yummy!
chunky loaded pizza, pasta, chicken wings, and more!
The good people at Pizza Hut also brought out pastas, chicken wings, garlic bread, wedges, and other goodies for us to sample. I’m a big fan of the chicken wings (Kim and I asked for another order), and you have to try their crisscross wedges too. The wedges goes really well with mayo and serves as a perfect compliment to the pizzas.
and we had a great time at Pizza Hut as usual
We had a great time, and even took a group photo for.. ahem, memory.
So if you haven’t had your share of Pizza Hut for a while, head to one of the branches and give this new Chunky Loaded Pizza a try! Good stuff.
I remember many years ago, Pizza Hut used to have some sort of buffet deal. For a set price you could eat as many pizzas as you can, and access the salad bar and soup too. As a teenager at the time, a bunch of classmates and I went to the branch at Penang Gurney with the mission to “beat” the deal and get the best value.
In between pizzas, we would go to the restroom and arm wrestle on the toilet bowl or started doing push ups. The idea was to spend more energy so that we could “get hungry again” and eat more.
I think most of us ended up over full and could barely walk, that was a piece of Pizza Hut memory that I always remember.
Pizza Hut Kota Damansara
While the buffet deal is long gone, Pizza Hut hasn’t stopped giving good value to diners. The already very good pricing just got better with the Pizza Hut 50% Off Promotion. A bunch of us were invited to the showcase of this promotion a few days back.
The promotion is simple. Every weekday there are two items on the menu that are 50% off, and each customer are entitled to order ONE of the two discounted item. In another word, if two of you go on Monday, one can order the chicken wings and the other the pizza and both items will be on 50% off. Same great quality, only half the price.
Lets look at the line up from Monday to Friday.
To steer away from Monday blue
Thirsty Tuesday
Assam Boi Fizz is the best seller at Pizza Hut, and my personal favorite too! Jelly, lime, assam, I love it!
Wake up to Wednesday
The soup comes with garlic bread too.
It’s Thursday, just one more day to the weekends!
This is one of my favorite pizzas here, with pineapple, onion, crabstick, tuna, and thousand island sauce too, very rich and very yummy!
And it’s Friday, woohoo!
To me, Pizza Hut is always a place where a group of friends come together to enjoy hearty food and basically have a good time, and that is indeed what we had over the session. Hey, that’s a 1Malaysian crowd too! 
The promotion is for the whole day on weekdays and not just for lunch time ya, so go have some! By the way, you can check out the TV Commercials too.
Ladies and gentlemen, today yours truly don on chef’s hat and pretend that I know something about cooking. The recipe you are about to read comes from the Southern part of the country that likes to police the world. Yes, that would be U S of A.
We are going to learn about fried okra, on of my all time favorite beer food that isn’t served in any restaurant this side of Pacific.
fried okra ingredients – okra, pepper, salt, egg, milk
First, the ingredients, and they are fairly simple:
fried okra makes for awesome beer food
Then, the steps, this is child’s play in terms of cooking, no post graduate degree in culinary field is required:
This is one yummy snack that goes very well with cold beer, Kilkenny, Heineken, Guinness, anything! I brought this as my contribution to Suan’s xmas eve potluck, and was happy that it was well received. Even master chef Lance liked it, and that is plenty good for me
mimi bacon pizza by Haze
Haze came up with this concoction that she called mini bacon pizza. The ingredient’s pretty straight forward:
Steps:
The result certainly did not disappoint either, I liked it a lot too!
clam chowder (Lance), bacon pasta (Suan), roast chicken (Kim), sausage (Horng)
Lance brought a pot of clam chowder that had uses some sort of bacon stock, it was by far the best clam chowder I’ve ever had! You can actually order it at bbq-addicts.com, I guarantee that you’ll be 100% satisfied!
Suan cooked up some bacon carbonara that turned out to be the best pasta she’s ever made, Kim too roasted a chicken, very juicy, and tasted plenty awesome right out of her new oven! Horng made some sort of east-meet-west sausage for the potluck.
xmas eve party at Suanie’s crib
The little get-together over xmas eve turned out to be a very gastronomically satisfying event. We had a little bit to drink (there’ll be plenty more for NYE in a few days’ time at Michael’s), and spent the night reliving the old tradition of watching Euro Trip all over again.
So how was your xmas?
I had initially wanted to offer you, my dear reader, another cute story related to Pizza Hut when I was in US.
A story much like the previous story penned on the article about Pizza Hut Fish King. My memory however, failed in this instance, and instead I have the following photo to show you, this was yours truly more than 10 years ago taken in a dorm at Bemidji State University (I spent a semester there).
taken in my dorm room at Bemidji State Univeristy, 1999 I think?
Now the only relation this photo has with Pizza Hut is that the Bangladesh dude behind, Masud, has a friend whose name I can’t remember, but worked for Pizza Hut delivery in the tiny city of Bemidji during my short stay there. Naturally, this other dude whose name I can’t remember, and whom I don’t have a picture of, sometimes brought us free pizzas!
An awesome perk when you’re a poor overseas student. Awesome pizza in frigid Minnesota winter is always a warm experience. *slurp*
Pizza Hut and the Extreme Cheesy 6 Pizzas
Anyway, fast forward 11 years, and following last May’s promotion, Pizza Hut is at it again, and this time around it is all about cheese! So naturally Haze and I picked up cheesie for the tasting session at Bukit Damansara. We were joined by a bunch of other bloggers including Huai Bin, Tim, Audrey, Saimatkong, kampungboycitygal, Michelle, and more.
It was quite literally, a feast.
check out the extreme cheesy 6 pizza with hawaiian chicken topping
To make this Extreme Cheesy 6 pizza, Pizza Hut imported six different premium cheese into the country (I can’t remember how many containers altogether but it was a very big number).
They are:
To be honest, I’m familiar with only the first three types of cheese, the other three were pretty foreign to me. Then again, why worry about the details when the overall end result is only thing we’re interested at?
.. and it was good. I wanted to put in beautiful descriptions and professional-ish sentences about the pizza, but at the end I can only tell you it is wholesomely cheesy and really does taste awesome!
mushroom and chicken sausage, pepperoni, original extreme cheesy 6
Extreme Cheesy 6 comes with original style with just all the six cheeses, as well as with several other toppings. There’s chicken sausage and mushroom, pepperoni (of course!), and Hawaiian chicken. My favorite is the Hawaiian chicken, with pieces of chicken meat and pineapple to complement the super cheesy taste.
pasta, garlic bread, chicken wings, and salad bar
Of course, other than pizzas, you can also find garlic bread, chicken wings, pastas, as well as the salad bar at Pizza Hut. I remember we used to stack up a huge plate of salad (we were allowed one visit to the bar if I remember correctly).
Tim, Huai Bin, Haze, Cheesie, Michelle, Audrey, KY, and others
In conjunction with the promotion on Extreme Cheesy 6 Pizza, there’s also a contest:
Write a post on “Why You Love Pizza Hut’s 6 Cheesy Extreme Pizza” (dine in or take away) with plenty of pictures with the 6 Cheese Pizza and be sure to mention all 6 types of cheese. Make it unique, interesting, and be creative. The title of your post must be “I’m crazy about Cheeeeeese!”
Top 5 winners will win RM 2000 cold hard cash each!
The contest runs from 21th Oct to 16th of Nov 2010 and is open to all Nuffnang registered bloggers.
Good luck folks and say Cheeseeeeeee!
A couple weeks ago @missyblurkit invited a few of us to a food review session by describing it as “lets have some Italian food” at Jalan P. Ramlee.
As it turned out, nothing could be further from her misinformation, the dinner at Trattoria Cucina Italiana turned out to be so overly plentiful and wholesome that describing it that way is akin to describing a 20 feet stretched Hummer limo as “some car”.
Trattoria Cucina Italiana
Trattoria Cucina Italiana is located on the ground floor of Rohas Perkasa, which is about a stone’s throw away from KLCC and Mandarin Oriental hotel and a pebble’s flick away from Thai club and Beach club.
The restaurant is beautifully furnished and tastefully decorated, but for some reasons beyond comprehension, it is represented by a very cheap looking “mamak style” backlit blue sign board with yellow fonts. I fully blame this banner for the invisibility of this eatery despite it’s prominent location.
By the way, there are free car park spaces right outside the restaurants for diners.
Caesar salad, caprese (buffalo mozzarella), seafood salad
We were served beer and the typical bread with olive oil and vinegar to get started, but soon enough the antipasti and salads came.
I’ve taken liberty to name the dishes in English rather than the more “authentic” name in Italian as specified on the menu. First was the Caesar salad (RM 26, or Insalata Caesare, if you woudl) and seafood salad (RM 27, Insalata tiepida di mare) that were beautifully presented and equally as delicious. I particularly love the fresh seafood and the juicy clams on the seafood salad!
The picture on the middle of the collage was Caprese (RM 33), fresh buffalo mozzarella with tomato, very interesting and should satisfy any cheese lover, though I don’t find myself fancy the whole serving of this all to myself.
mixed Italian cheese platter, tuna salad, eggplant pie
The other half of our appetizers consist of the lovely Italian cheese platter (RM 37), tuna salad (RM 26), and this interesting eggplant pie (RM 23) that was stuffed with mozzarella and tomato.
The cheese platter was served with a few tiny bottles of sweet fruit jam, I didn’t know the combination of pungent blue cheese with jam could taste so good, it was addictive! Tuna salad didn’t disappoint either, and the eggplant pie turned out to be less exciting as I’d imagined. It was not bad though.
seafood pasta, spinach pasta with mushroom sauce, ravioli with salmon sauce
It is a sin to not have pasta for any Italian food review, thus right after the antipasti and salads, we were served several signature pastas from Tattroria.
I had the chance to gorge myself more of those yummy juicy clams from the seafood pasta (RM 35, spaghetti allo scoglio), so needless to say it was another good dish.
The spinach pasta (RM 29, papperdelle verdi ai funghi) is served with mushroom sauce, and the ravioli stuffed with seafood (RM 32, raviolo nero di pesce al salmone) and swims in salmon sauce. Both of these dishes were pretty rich and creamy and should suit the taste of those who prefer their pastas served as such – rich and flavorful.
gnocchi with bolognese sauce, cappelletti pasta, mushroom risotto
With the pastas, we also had potato gnocchi with bolognese sauce (RM 34), cappelleti pasta (RM 31), and mushroom risotto (RM 38).
Gnocchi is another very rich tasting dish with strong potato and bolognese taste. Cappelleti pasta is stuffed with cheese in cream and turkey ham sauce. At this point, I was a bit overdosed with cream and rich cheese based sauce already. I’m sure they tasted much better when you don’t have so many of similar dishes at once.
The mushroom risotto provided a sense of balance and departure from the creamy pasta taste. They prepared it quite true to the origin, as in “not very well cooked”, but that’s the way them Italians like it, and I find it quite nice actually.
1kg T bone steak, sliced tenderloin, grilled lamb
I thought we were done after the 9 of us went through 12 different dishes, in fact, I was mentally prepared to see desserts coming, but what came instead was another half a dozen dishes. Only they’re even bigger this time. *pengsan*
The 1-KG T-bone steak (RM 128) was huge, and can easily feed 3 adults, or about 27 skinny models. Though it is not wagyu prime ribs at Prime, the T-bone does hold up to it’s own, pretty juicy and flavorful, if lacking the marbled fats.
The sliced sirloin (RM 59) had a smoother and softer texture that I liked, and I do feel that the aromatic herbs with rocket did add some welcoming sophistication to the meat.
Grilled marinated lamb chop (RM 71) is another dish that can feed 2 smaller eaters. I found it to be pretty average though, not something I would order myself, there a lot of better choices on the menu.
seafood grill, mixed grill, pizza
The seafood grill (RM 126, griliata mista di pesce) came with 4 huge tiger prawns, cod fish, squid, seabass, and some grilled vegetable. This is another dish to share, and it was actually really good, especially the seabass, so yummy!
Mixed grill (RM 120, griliata mista di carne) is another dish that is impossible to finish alone. There’s grilled chicken, sirloin, lamb chop, and chicken sausage. I tried some of the chicken sausage and they were surprisingly good.
I also took a small slice of the pizza carnivora (RM 68) that had tomato, mozzarella, beef salami, chicken sausage, and turkey ham. It was pretty good, but at that point I was already seriously over fed.
desserts galore – tiramisu, cake
After 18 different dishes, of course, it was dessert time. The tiramisu (RM 26), apple cake with chocolate cream and vanilla ice cream (RM 24) were rich and pretty tasty. On the other hand, the shaved iced lime with strawberry thing (not on menu) was rather refreshing and gave the palette a good wash.
ice cream with espresso, molten chocolate cake, creme brulee
There’s also the vanilla ice cream with espresso (RM 17, affogato), the classic creme brulee (RM 22), and my favorite dessert of the night – molten chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream (RM 26, fondente al cioccolato) that was so rich and flavorful we finished it in a bout 0.8 second.
The good chef also treated us a shot of chocolate liquor each. This supposed traditional breakfast drink for Italian was so rich, sweet, and concentrated I felt I was drinking some gourmet liquefied chocolate with alcohol. I liked it a lot.
ze chef, Haze, Gareth, Kim, KY, Horng
While Trattoria Cucina Italiana might not have a very welcoming sign board, do check it out if you are into authentic Italian cousin prepared by real Italians and favored by expatriates. Drinks and some desserts are priced slightly on the higher side, but overall I find that most of the main dishes and appetizers were of great value.
Give it a try, remember there’s free hassle free parking right in front of the restaurant too!
Address:
Trattoria Cucina Italiana
Wisma Rohas Perkasa
8 Jalan P. Ramlee,
50540 Kuala Lumpur
GPS: 3.15485, 101.708711
Tel: 03-2163 2368
