2:48AM - Entertaining Kuwait since 2003

I’m willing to bet this isn’t the original one.

Kout Way is a small Kuwaiti fast food restaurant that opened up last summer in Salmiya. I love murabyan (rice with shrimps) but wasn’t really sure what to expect with a “fast food” version of the dish. Turns out it’s pretty much the same.

I really like how Kout Way looks like on the inside. It has a modern and trendy interior with hints of tradition here and there. Like all fast food restaurants it’s self service, you order at the counter and then go sit down and wait for your meal. I of course ordered the murabyan, I had two sizes to choose from regular or small, I ended up going with the regular size. I also ordered cheese sambousa and cucumber yogurt for my sides.

Regular size it was not that’s for sure. The portion was pretty huge and they weren’t stingy with the quantity of shrimps either. At first I thought the shrimps were just on top of the rice but the more I kept digging into the rice the more shrimps I found. It also tasted pretty good specially considering this was a fast food version of the dish. The cheese sambousa on the other hand weren’t that great while the cucumber yogurt, well it’s just cucumber and yogurt so you can’t go wrong with that.

Overall I really like the place and at KD3 for the regular sized murabyan or KD2 for the small it’s pretty decently priced. The restaurant is located on Baghdad Street right next to Dodo [Google Maps]. They also deliver and their number is 94006767.

I didn’t know the Ahmadi Park had a zoo yet alone one that looks this depressing. Based on the pictures a reader sent me this zoo looks even worse than the Kuwait Zoo.

Thanks Meshal

[YouTube]

If you don’t know what the Harlem Shake is, click [Here]

via @hishersq8

Update: Here is a funnier one also from Kuwait

[YouTube]

Over the weekend I decided to pass by three museums with a friend of mine. All three museums are located right next to each other so you could cover them all in under two hours. There’s actually a fourth museum right next to the Maritime Museum which you could visit as well, the Modern Art Museum, but they were closed when I passed by.

Maritime Museum
Our first stop was the Maritime Museum which is located opposite Souk Sharq. It’s easy to spot since they have to large wooden ships parked outside with a miniature light house [Google Maps]. The museum is pretty nicely designed on the inside, it’s two floors and pretty modern looking with a ship like structure being the main inspiration to the design. They have a lot of sea related items on display from old tools used to build the ships to fishermen gear. Really worth checking out.

Here is their visiting hours:

Monday to Saturday
8:30AM to 12:30PM and 4:30PM to 8:30PM

Friday
4:30PM to 8:30PM

Dickson House Cultural Centre
Further up the road was the Dickson House Cultural Centre. The Dickson House served as offices and residences for the British Political Agents in the early 1900’s. I didn’t like this place much since there wasn’t much to see inside and the whole interior was refurbished but not to the original state. The outdoor yard in the back on the other hand was nice and the Dickson House caretaker Fayez, whom one of my readers nicknamed the Tour Guide Nazi (in reference to Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi) was a really interesting character. I actually enjoyed sitting on the bench in the yard chatting with him more than the actual tour. [Google Maps]

Here is their visiting hours:

Monday to Saturday
8:30AM to 11:30AM and 4:30PM to 8:30PM

Friday
4:30PM to 8:30PM

Amricani Cultural Centre
The final destination was the Amricani Cultural Centre which is located across the street from the House of Parliament. The Amricani was originally the American Mission Hospital and just recently got renovated and opened to the public. Lectures and exhibitions take place there occasionally but when I passed by there wasn’t anything going on. They do have a 20 minute movie you can watch about the history of the hospital but personally I’d go there just to see their freaky looking display. It’s a small corner showing how the hospital used to look like when it first opened but it really looks like a scene from the movie SAW. Definitely worth checking out. They didn’t have opening hours displayed and I couldn’t find anything on their website but my guess it’s similar to the other two museums above. [Google Maps]

Monday to Saturday
8:30AM to 11:30AM and 4:30PM to 8:30PM

Friday
4:30PM to 8:30PM

All the museums above are free of charge to enter.

According to a friend of mine there was a fire today at Carrefour in The Avenues. The parking underneath was also flooded but not sure if its from the sprinklers or a burst pipe. If anyone has any more information or pictures [Email Me]

Thanks Patrick

Update: According to another source of mine the fire actually started at the Athletes Foot and not Carrefour. Fire sprinklers went off at various spots around the mall and that caused electric shorts as well as flooded the area hence why there was so much water in the parking lot.

If anyone has a longer version email me it. [YouTube]

The Menus Complex is located in Abu Halifa and by the looks of it will be opening pretty soon. As of now the complex will house the following restaurants:

Ribs and Rumps
Elevation Burger
Zaatar w Zeit
Lorenzo
Millions of Milkshakes
Nestle Toll House
Stone Grill
Dip n Dip

The first restaurant that will be opening at the complex is Elevation Burger (pictured above) and they’ll be opening this coming Tuesday. Compared to Spoons this complex seems to have more parking space and less traffic in the general vicinity so that should make it more convenient. Menus is located right after Hilton (if Hilton is on your right hand side). Here is the location on [Google Maps]

Last week I got invited to Dubai to take part in the Porsche World Roadshow that was taking place there. I wasn’t sure what to expect I was just hoping I would be able to drive some cars really fast around the track and that’s exactly what happened.

Once we arrived to the Dubai Autodrome race track we were greeted by nearly 30 Porsches parked nicely outside the pits. The cars looked beautiful and I couldn’t wait to get in one. After a short briefing by the instructors we were divided into four groups and taken to our cars.

We had four different exercises we took part in, Handling 1, Handling 2, Off-road and Slalom. Handling 1 involved taking the brand new 911’s and Boxsters out onto the track where we drove them as fast as we could. Handling 2 involved taking out the Panemaras around the track. Off-road was obviously where we took the Cayenne’s and finally the slalom was a small competition involving the new Boxster.

I hadn’t driven any Porsche before so I really had a lot of fun driving them around the track through out the day. My favorite car had to be the Porsche 911 4S but the Boxster S was also surprisingly fast and nimble. With the amount of Porsches on the streets in Kuwait I keep forgetting that they’re not really affordable even though everyone seems to have one. Now like everybody else, I also want one.

The Kuwaiti futsal team scored a pretty strange free kick goal against the Jordanian team during their game over the weekend. Check it out in the video above. [YouTube]

Thanks Allen

I passed by The Cheesecake Factory at The Avenues this morning for breakfast. Every Saturday morning from 10AM to 2PM they have a special brunch menu and I was curious to try their pancakes since I had heard they were really good. I ended up ordering two dishes for myself, the Monte Cristo Sandwich and the Buttermilk Pancakes. What is the Monte Cristo? This is the description from their website:

Monte Cristo Sandwich
Crunchy French Toast Stuffed with Bacon, Grilled Ham, Scrambled Eggs and Melted Swiss Cheese Dusted with Powdered Sugar and Served with Strawberry Preserves.

The Monte Cristo was ridiculously good, probably my favorite breakfast dish right now. Their pancakes now are also easily my favorite pancakes in Kuwait. They were really fluffy and light and I had to stop myself from finishing them. Which brings me to a very important problem with this breakfast.

THE CALORIES!

If you’re a calorie counter you’re in for a treat. The Monte Cristo Sandwich is a whopping 1,618 calories while the Buttermilk Pancakes are 1,310 calories. Try to figure out a way to burn those.

Service was so so. Took me a few tries to explain to the waiter I wanted pancakes and even when I pointed at it in the menu he thought I was pointing at another dish. I also told him to bring all the food together but my Monte Cristo came first. Not major issues but still worth noting. The pancakes cost KD3 while the Monte Cristo I think was KD4.250. I highly recommend both dishes and it’s too bad they only serve them on Saturdays. Oh and of course I wish they were both just 500 calories combined instead of being nearly 3,000…

Everyone who’s been to the Kuwait Zoo knows how sad and depressing the place is. I’ve written about it a number of times and it’s just something that has bewildered me for a very long time. Why is the zoo the way it is? I always figured the people who worked at the zoo didn’t care about the animals but after meeting a few of the staff members recently I now know that’s not true. Turns out there are two main reasons why the zoo is a disaster, the first is the zoo visitors and the second is they just don’t have enough money to make it better.

The Visitors
Majority of the people who visit the zoo do not respect the animals nor do they respect any of the rules. On one trip to the zoo during the daytime when it was fairly empty I witnessed three different incidents in a space of 15 minutes that summarizes the problem with the people at the zoo. The first incident took place at the elephant enclosure. We noticed a woman with her young kid had climbed over the fence, through the cactuses all the way to the wall of the elephant enclosure and were taking pictures next to the trunk of the elephant that was sticking out. One of the zoo employees who was with me yelled at the women to get away from the elephant because it was dangerous and the woman just coldly took her time making her way back out over the fence as if she had done nothing wrong. A few meters away on the other corner of the enclosure there was a kid next to his mother with a bag of oranges throwing them at the second elephant. Again the zoo employee had to stop the kid from throwing oranges at the elephant while the mother was pretending she wasn’t noticing any of this.

The third incident occurred just a short distance away at the baboon enclosure. As we arrived we noticed a kid was on top of the fence sticking french fries into the baboon cage trying to feed them. His mother and his sister were standing next to him watching and then the baboon stuck his hand out of the cage and the little boy tried to kick it hard but ended up missing and hitting the cage. The zoo employee I was with yelled at the boy to get down and then pulled the kid down but the kid kept climbing back up wanting to feed the baboons. The employee was telling the kid how dangerous it was since the baboons can bite and scratch people when his mother started shouting at her. She told the employee that no one cares about her kids more than her and if this was dangerous she wouldn’t be letting her kids feed the baboons. I was just standing there going WTF?

Visitors are one of the biggest issues of the zoo. I’ve already posted about how some kids try to kill the animals with slingshots and how the trash people throw into the cages end up killing the animals as well. A lot of kids are uneducated and abusive throwing whatever they can at the animals or in the case above trying to kick them. This is why the zoo tries to protect the animals using chicken wire (a fence with very small openings) around the cages, cactus plants, higher fences and security guards. But even those defenses fail all the time, people still manage to shove food into the cages, they pull down the chicken wire fence and put it on top of the cactuses so they can walk on them towards the cages. Even security guards get ignored and the guards are too afraid to confront the visitors anyway.

No Budget
Now this second issue is the bigger of the two. The zoo has limited financial resources. Although Kuwait is a rich country, the zoo and animals aren’t really a priority. Right now there are two major enclosures for example that need to be changed or fixed but the zoo staff haven’t been able to secure the budget for them.

The first problem is the elephant enclosure. Right now there are two elephants and the enclosure is pretty tiny. The larger of the two elephants has started destroying the walls of the enclosure because of frustration. The zoo submitted a proposal to double the size of the enclosure since there is an empty plot right next to the elephant enclosure but the proposal was rejected. Instead a construction company was brought in to install large metal beams around the elephant enclosure as a solution (pictured above).

The second problem that is in dire need of attention is the chimpanzee cage (pictured above). There are four chimps in one of the most depressing cages I’ve ever seen. They have no entertainment whatsoever inside, it’s just a rectangular dark cage with concrete floors and thats it. But, there’s a great spot in the zoo which the staff want to convert to a chimp enclosure. It’s a large space (see below) that can be planted with trees and greenery and chimps can roam free in it. The plan was proposed but rejected due to budgetary reasons. So now the space is gonna be turned into a reptile enclosure filled with a few crocs and turtles which is going to be a complete waste of space.

So although the staff do want to improve the zoo they just don’t have any money do so. It’s very depressing. Even when it comes to fixing enclosures or purchasing new medical equipment it’s all handled in the same low priority “put a bandaid on it” way.

The Solution
The visitors problem is very difficult to fix. One way would be to increase the prices of the tickets (currently it’s 500fils) in hopes that would stop or lessen the amount of visitors that come to the zoo. Educating the parents and the children is too large a task for the zoo to handle and signs and leaflets really have no effect. The most realistic solution to the people problem is to continue and try to protect the animals (I suggested replacing cactus plants with barbed wire) and hiring Kuwaiti security to replace the current expats.

The solution with the budget should be simpler… just increase the budget, but that’s not happening. A more realistic option we discussed is sponsorship by private companies. Companies could sponsor an animal enclosure and the money would be used to build it or improve it. It’s something that’s done in other zoos around the world and in this situation it would be a great way to solve a lot of the problems.

By the way you’re a company and are interested in doing this, email me for more details [Here]

It’s really sad that the zoo doesn’t have any money to improve the situation for the animals. It’s not only the elephants and the chimps that are in trouble but those two are the priorities right now. The baboon cage for example has around 70 baboons inside and is over crowded. The tiger needs more space, the hippos need a new water filter for their pool and one of the giraffes is limping but they don’t have a portable xray machine to check and see why. They even have one animal enclosure nicknamed Guantanamo because it’s that bad.

The problems with the zoo are major and hopefully I was able to bring it some exposure.

Thai Chow King is a small hole in the wall Thai food restaurant that was recommended to me by one of my readers. It’s a tiny place run by a Thai family. The father who used to work at Sheraton before does the cooking while his wife waits on tables. This little gem of a place has suddenly become my favorite Thai food place.

I passed by for lunch today with a friend and we ended up ordering the following dishes:

Tom Yum Soup with Shrimp KD1.500
Tom Kha Kai Soup with Shrimp KD1.500
Shrimp on Toast KD1.500
Fried Shrimp Wanton KD1.500
Seafood Salad KD1.500
Red Curry Beef KD1.500
Pad Thai with Chicken KD1.250
Mixed Vegetables KD1.250
Chicken with Cashew KD1.500
Steamed Rice KD0.500
Large Water KD0.250

Notice anything with the prices? The most expensive dishes we had cost just KD1.500! This place is such a good deal specially since the food was really good. The curry was delicious, the pad thai was also really good and the chicken with cashew dish was nice and crispy (although had only 2 cashew pieces). Even the shrimp on toast and fried wantons were appetizing and served with great tasting dips.

The restaurant is small with just 5 tables and every dish on the menu has a picture next to it which makes choosing something very easy. I really can’t think of anything to fault about the place. I loved it and how could I not when the food was delicious, filling and our bill came out to just KD13.750.

Thai Chow King is located in Al-Regae and their phone numbers are 24893338 or 66527388. Finding them is easy, here is their location on [Google Maps]

I’m not a fan of the Super Bowl but I love the commercials. You can check out most this years ads on YouTube [Here]

[YouTube]

I’ve featured a lot of talented Kuwaiti musicians on the blog from the likes of Faisal Al-Salem who’s a lead singer for a very popular Japanese thrash metal band and Naser Al-Marzouq, the young and blind Kuwaiti piano player. Mubarak Al Rashed is another Kuwait musician who I think is also really talented.

I found out about Mubarak a few days ago when a reader emailed me telling me about him. Mubarak is a cop by day and an extremely talented Hindi singer by night. It’s a pretty strange combination but if you watch him sing in the video above you’ll see how great is. There are even more videos of him singing [Here]

I also found this old cached Kuwait Times article which has a bit more information on Mubarak and how he got into Hindi music. You can check that article [Here]

Thanks Francis