This landmark culinary institution will be remembered fondly by all its diners
For 99 years, the Coliseum Café and Grill House in Kuala Lumpur stood strong, serving its trademark Hainanese-Chinese cuisine to scores of hungry diners.
Sadly, all good things must come to an end. The beloved colonial restaurant recently announced it would be shutting down for good, after its tenancy agreement in a pre-war building along Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman expired. This was just a few months short of what would have been its 100th anniversary. Three other Coliseum outlets, in Petaling Jaya, Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya, will remain open.
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This news was greeted with dismay as Coliseum Café holds a special place in many of its loyal patrons' hearts. There’s a lot about it to cherish, from its sizzling steaks and fish concalaise to its antique furniture and Wild West-saloon style bar. We asked a few of these patrons to share their fondest memories of this culinary institution.
"It wasn’t the service or the sizzling steaks served with pomp and circumstance. (In fact, the former was often dour and the latter overcooked.) It was the feeling of being suspended in time, of harking back to one’s youth, even if those years weren’t yours to begin with. It was the sparkle in my mother’s eyes when she told my siblings and I about scrounging cents to treat herself at Coliseum Café.
The funny thing is that when we supped there, she’d still gravitate towards her creature comforts, namely fried bee hoon served with an obscene amount of cili padi (she still loves her rice vermicelli, but can no longer handle the heat) instead of something ‘novel’ as say, Fish Concalaise (perch under a blanket of cream sauce) or the Gourmet Chicken Burger (tinned pineapple lent a touch of ‘exoticism’).
Coliseum Café was where my younger brother might have had his first mocktail (I only remember my sister and I giving him hell for ordering the Minnie Mouse, a gruesome concoction of Sprite and strawberry ice cream) and where I, as a child drawn to textures, marvelled at the softness of the cloth napkins, which on my last visit, had been replaced by pink plasticky serviettes. My only regret is not trying the pot pies, which required advance planning; the problem is that we’d only remember their existence on our next visit."
— Samantha Lim, Tatler Malaysia's Dining Editor