Kuala Lumpur - Malaysian and Chinese Food at Airport Plaza in Hazlet

We tried the Kuala Lumpur Restaurant at Airport Plaza in Hazlet on Friday evening. A fierce storm had just come down from New York and Connecticut, so the power was out around town and the cops were directing traffic. We thought the restaurant might be closed, but the hostess quickly stepped out and encouraged us to come inside and eat.

I picked up a carry-out menu on the way out so I could describe the meals we ordered, but the dinner menu has more items and neither of our meals nor the soup are found on the carry-out menu. My wife and I decided to try the Malaysian cuisine; she had a fancy salted fish meal and I had a meal with chicken, mangoes, onions, and some sort of curry sauce. Both were excellent.

As a prelude, we picked a soup -- most had shrimp, which my wife can't have, so we got what I thnk was called the Stone Pot Soup. I don't recommend it. First of all, it was unwieldy, with long spaghetti-like noodles that couldn't easily be served into the bowls. It also had a heavy curry-like stock that had the consistency of the muddy Mississippi. Try something else.

The serving staff were efficient but the infrastructure and atmosphere weren't the best. The restaurant is in a storefront so it goes deep, with maybe eight booths down one side and half a dozen large round tables down the other side. The booth benches were in rather bad shape, with cuts into the plastic fabric of the seating. Clear Christmas lights are strung but not lit. A travel promotion of some sort adorned the tabletop under a sheet of glass, but we couldn't figure out what it was about. One of the staff proceeded up and down the aisle following his toddler who had free rein of the place for about five or ten minutes. And maybe it was the storm, but only one other group was in the place.

Caution: Most of the online maps incorrectly place this restaurant about a mile east of its actual location, at the corner of Route 36 and Stone Road. It is actually at the corner of Route 36 and Middle Road.

In summary, I highly recommend the main courses we had but I don't think I'll be doing there again for a sit-down meal. And since what we had isn't on the carry-out menu, I guess we won't be going back. For other thoughts on the place, check a December 2008 review at NJ.com and March and May 2009 reviews at Yelp.

On our way home, we stopped at Hazlet Plaza on Route 35 to visit a drug store, but it was closed. (Have you noticed they've hung a fabric sign that reads Walgreens over the old Drug Fair sign? I guess it's temporary. I hope.) Anyway, there was a man standing outside the China Buffet restaurant next door. He directed our attention to the roiling sky. We looked up and stared in amazement at the unusual clouds -- hundreds of little pouches dangling from the sky, with lightning shooting through the swirling formation. It seems that these are mammatus clouds --The Gawker indicates that these "popcorn clouds" were also seen over SoHo that same evening.