Bait

If I’m on a holiday, Bait is the kind of beach café I’d happily park myself in and spend the rest of the day eating and drinking wine. Okay, the staff can sometimes be a bit too relaxed, such that service becomes a little patchy, but they are generally helpful and friendly. Other than that, I could see Bait becoming a regular: The flavours are clean and light, and the general vibe is cool and easy-going.

The menu, as you can surmise from the name, is dominated by seafood. It’s well curated – just enough to give you choice but not too much that it overwhelms you. But what makes this a good menu is the freshness of the produce and the chef’s simple cooking style, which respects the fish’s natural flavours. Each of the fish dishes we ordered had just-cooked-through flesh that retained much of the fish’s delicate texture. That’s no easy feat.

To start, we had the Surf & Turf platter. The deep-fried dory fish and prawn fritters were wrapped in a light-but-still-crunchy casing that was not the least bit oily. The lemon garlic butter provided a zesty complement to the steamed clams’ and mussels’ natural briny flavours – though a tad salty. The spicy chicken wings, while serviceable, just paled in comparison with the seafood on the platter.

As for the mains, out of the three dishes we had, the Atlantic salmon served with a creamy cucumber slaw was the best. The salmon was perfectly cooked through the middle but still moist, flaky and pinkish. And the sour-y yoghurt of the cucumber slaw cut through the oiliness of the fish, resulting in a surprisingly refreshing dish. The grilled mackerel served with fresh mango salsa was summery, where the lightness of the fruits paired well with the firm, oily flesh of the mackerel. The crab meat farfelle was packed with crab flavours, just like it promised, but we wish there were more juicy crab meat in it.

While Bait hosts a DJ gig on Friday nights, it’s still very much a restaurant at heart. But the thing that will make you linger post dinner is the wine list – again, a well-curated list of red, wine and rose from both old and new worlds. Our recommendation? Just go with the house pour. The Chilean Hemisferio sauvignon blanc is smooth, floral and fruity at the same time with just a hint of sweetness – and it’s just RM19 per glass or RM95 per bottle during happy hours. We had a bottle, or was it two?