Monday, September 06, 2010
It’s been a while so I thought I would say hi. I am at Nila, a restaurant/takeaway in Sydney Road Coburg specializing in Malaysian, Singaporean and South Indian Halal Cuisine. It has been zhuzhied up since I was here last, with elegant arrays of plastic flowers, a new baie marie and better lighting. The staff continues to be friendly and polite and the food delightful and tasty. The place smells nice too, like it is a place which sells spicy and interesting food, which it does. It is warm and there is a rather relentless chanty music playing quietly. There are some signs hanging from the ceiling which are also part of the new décor and they advertise ‘Best lunch in the town’, this on a sign where I think part of the plexiglass coversheet has not been removed, as the words ‘Transparency, Performance, Functionality… Plexiglass’ are very visible on the sign. At first I thought this was Nila’s mission statement but now I think it’s Plexiglass’s. You can also buy avocado juice here (at $4.95 a glass – not cheap) but I have to say, while I like avocados and have never drunk avocado juice, I do feel it is a juice option that might well make me sick. Instead I am drinking a can of something I bought called Apple Fruit Drink, a product of Malaysia, made by a company called Treefresh. It is not awful. One of the things I most like about the new look Nila is the extensive collections of cutlery on each table, there are 20-30 knives and forks arranged here in containers covered with aluminium foil. All in all I would recommend Nila either for eating in or taking away.