Pasta Zanmai at Gurney Paragon

Pasta Zanmai at Gurney Paragon

When you are at the 6th floor of Gurney Paragon, you will notice three eateries at a corner just in front of the escalator. You have Rakuzen, Sushi Zanmai and Pasta Zanmai. The three outlets are actually related to one another because they belong to the same owner. 

Futuristic looking lighting in the restaurant

We went and scanned through their menus before finally deciding on Pasta Zanmai. The reasons we choose Pasta Zanmai over the other two are that it is something new to us and it offers fusion cuisine (of Japanese and Italian food). It sounds exciting and tempting to have cheese and wasabi on the same plate.

Open kitchen: you can see what the chefs are doing in the kitchen

In our opinion, Sushi Zanmai offers the usual choices of sushi like other Japanese restaurants.  It is a little boring. While Rakuzen offers bento sets and we were informed that they were more of Japanese fine dining. It reflects in their prices too.

Next to Sushi Zanmai, there is a shop selling Japanese food stuff and junk food and it also belongs to them. 

What we ate and the price (before 16 % tax):

The exciting part is that a mini set comes with two selection of food. 

1. Mini Chicken Cream Sauce Pasta & Soft Shell Crab Tortilla Roll (RM 26)

2. Mini Seafood Kimuchi Soup Pasta & Salmon Sashimi (RM 26)

3. Dessert: Sansu Mori ( 3 scoops of ice-cream: Chocolate, green tea, black sesame) (RM 12)

The drinks and the price:

Warm water (free of charge)

Green Tea (RM3) (a pot for a person)

Our pot of hot green tea for a person

The verdict:

The cream sauce pasta / spaghetti is served with strips of fried chicken and slices of mushrooms. The pasta and cream is good. The strips of fried chicken have a very strong chicken taste. It can be overwhelming to me but not my hubby. It is still good to him. The best part is the soft shell crab tortilla rolls. Oh my gosh...it is really tasty and the fried soft shell crab is not too oily. This is a must try dish here. 

Cream pasta with fried chicken (in strips)

Love the presentation of the tortilla rolls with soft shell crabs

6 yummy soft shell crab tortilla rolls

The seafood Kimuchi soup pasta is tantalising to our taste buds. It sourish soup goes well with spaghetti too (I did not realise this until then). It has a lot of mushrooms, a prawn, a clam and rings of cuttle fish in it. Thumbs up! The salmon sashimi taste really fresh and goes well with some soy sauce and wasabi. 

The hot bowl of seafood Kimuchi soup with pasta

Salmon sashimi 

We love the presentation of the ice-cream as the three scoops of ice-cream are presented in a boat-shaped plate. The black sesame ice-cream is the best. The chocolate ice-cream tastes real chocolaty and not too sweet. The green tea ice-cream could have been better. The flavour of the green tea is not that strong. We have tasted better green tea ice-cream at Sushi Zento and Miraku at G Hotel. 

Black sesame ice-cream is the best.

Our dessert: Sansu Mori

Psst..pst.. they have pizza too. Unfortunately, they did not serve pizza on that day so we did not get to try one.

We had dined on a weekday. So, getting a table was not a problem to us. The restaurant is rather small and I think it can only accommodate roughly 10 tables at a time.

Details of the place:

Address:

Pasta Zanmai & Hokkaido Ice Cream

163D-6-38, Persiaran Gurney

10250 Penang. (At Gurney Paragon)

Tel: 04-2189600

Closed at 10 p.m., last order at 9.30 p.m.