Buffet High Tea - Essence in Sheraton Imperial KL

Since the darling and I were both a little under the weather, we decide to pamper ourselves a little with a trip to Essence at the Sheraton Imperial KL. After all, the saying does go "Starve a Fever, Feed a Cold." And we did have an unused complimentary dining voucher lying around.

We start off our tour at the Sushi and Smoothie bars. The sushi bar is terribly unappealing; with only the most basic of rolls (not a single slice of fish anywhere), so we skip. The darling has a honeydew smoothe - I go for banana.


The bread corner - decent selection. Perhaps we chose wrongly, but the bread that we did choose was just average.


Onward to the salads and starters then. Nice choice of cold cuts, and mix-it-yourself rojak and caesar salad corners.

* note to self: wow you way overdid the saturation on this picture.


Local food corner. Hits: Hainanese Chicken Rice and Quail Soup. Misses: Chicken Murtabak and Chili Crab.


Roast corner. Today's roast was leg of lamb - which was a big miss for me. Had an exceedingly strong gamey taste and it was dry and rubbery. Had to overload on the mint sauce for it to be edible.


Pasta section - where the "chef" cooks up a choice of either spaghetti or penne, with a choice of tomato, cream, or bolognese sauces. I had the spaghetti bolognese, which sucked. And not sucked in a "compared to 5-star Italian restaurants like Prego" way, it sucked in a "it just sucked." way.


Chinese food corner. Small selection of dim sum like siew mai and pao, of which we didn't bother trying.


Having half-filled our stomachs, we move on to desserts! The cheesecake is bad, but the chocolate mousse, chocolate soup, and chocolate mud cakes are nice.


Other mini-desserts that were pretty nice were the orange jelly (with slice of chocolate on top), apple slices with cream, and some sort of cream custard on a biscuit.


Finally we end the eating session with some papaya with lime (yum) and watermelon.


Overall we come away rather disappointed. The selection isn't great, and the food is decidedly average. I didn't get the exact price of the buffet, but at estimated MYR80-MYR90++ per person, there are too many better places to spend your money.

Don't come here unless you can eat at a heavy discount. Or if you're eating free (like us).