Usually, when I write about new restaurants that just opened up I talk about the food, but not in this case. The Cardamom Club is a new Indian restaurant that recently opened up and I think it has the best looking interior of any restaurant in Kuwait.
The restaurant is part of the Napkin Affair group who also own the concepts Ubon, Ananas, Simsim, and Mana. They designed all their restaurants in house and until recently I had thought Ananas was their best work, but not anymore. So far I’ve been to The Cardamom Club twice and on both occasions, I thought the food was average but the interior really beautiful.
If you’re looking for a new place to try out you should give The Cardamom Club a visit, they’re located in Kuwait City right next to the pizza place Pinocchio’s. Here is their location on [Google Maps] and their instagram account is @cardamom.club
Below is this weekends list of events and a bunch of interesting things happening including two events at the race track, the Drag Racing Championship and the Open Track. As usual, if I missed anything, let me know in the comments:
Last year 7-Eleven opened their first location in Kuwait, but I passed by it recently and it looks like they’ve rebranded to just Eleven. I guess they either lost the franchise or were never official and so were forced to rename the place. Awkward.
Mercer’s Quality of Living rankings list was recently released and the regional order has pretty much remained unchanged. I thought Saudi Arabia might move up from the previous years because of the recent changes that have taken place there but their ranking hasn’t really changed. Mercer puts together this list by evaluating a number of factors including recreation, housing, economic environment, consumer goods availability, public services and transport, political and social environment, natural environment, socio-cultural environment, school and education and medical and health considerations.
1 – Vienna, Austria
74 – Dubai, United Arab Emirates
78 – Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
105 – Muscat, Oman
110 – Doha, Qatar
126 – Kuwait City, Kuwait
136 – Manama, Bahrain
164 – Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
168 – Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
231 – Baghdad, Iraq
The list above shows Kuwait’s ranking compared to neighboring countries but if you’d like to see how your home country ranks in the world, you can check out the full list on Mercer’s website [Here]
Recently a decision was made to cancel the use of residency stickers inside passports. Instead, you’ll need to have a valid Civil ID card when traveling as a means of verifying your residency. The name on the Civil ID card has to match your name in your passport or you’ll risk being denied travel in or out of Kuwait. Having weird spellings or incorrect data on the Civil ID is pretty common, so if your info doesn’t match your passport, you now have to fix it. Yesterday someone on Reddit posted the steps below on how to go about doing this:
Step 1) Go to the PACI eEnvelope system website, if the website is in Arabic you can change the language to English, there’s an option at the top of the page
Step 2) Click on non-Kuwaiti Renewal
Step 3) Enter your Civil ID and serial no. which is shown on the back
Step 4) You’ll have to verify your mobile no. so they’ll send you a verification SMS
Step 5) Enter all data required (blood type is optional but if that needs changing too then you’ll need to also upload a lab report)
Step 6) Upload the required documents
Step 7) You’ll be sent an application’s reference number to your registered mobile no., which you can use to track your application’s progress
Step 8) Wait and wait, this will take a few days as your application needs to be checked manually, once it’s approved you’ll be sent a link on your mobile to make the payment of KD5, after that you’ll just go have to go to South Surra to replace your old ID with the new one
Hey, this is your local film buff checking in on my yearly visit to this blog to spout out my favorite films of the year (because my opinion is right and everyone else is wrong).
Disclaimer: At the time of writing this article, I hadn’t seen the following highly acclaimed films that might have had a spot otherwise: Border, Caphernaum, Minding the Gap, The Rider, and Suspiria
Note: This year has proven to be one of the worst years for Hollywood Big Studio films, but an incredible year for independent cinema. As such, you may have never heard of some of the films listed below, but how boring would it be if I wrote this entire giant article just talking about films you already know. Wouldn’t it be great to be recommended stuff you haven’t heard of, so you can find it in you to take a risk and watch it? Who knows, you might find yourself surprised to discover a gem you would have never searched for otherwise…
Yesterday I launched the new and improved look for the blog which I worked on with the team at Wavai. I tried to keep everything mostly in the same place, I just cleaned up and simplified the layout a bit. The biggest change is that the blog is now finally mobile-phone friendly. If you access the blog from your phone (which 65% of you do), then you’re going to see a much simpler and clearer 1-column layout.
There are a lot of issues that still need to be worked out with the new design, and I’m still working on a lot of random little things behind the scenes so please be patient. It’s probably going to take a couple of more weeks for me to finish everything. Once I’m done with the main page I’ll work on applying the new look to all the other sections on the blog like the Events page and Classifieds. For now, let me know what you think.
Around a decade ago, maybe more, there used to be a store in Muthana Complex that used to just sell telescopes. That store closed down ages ago and after that, the only other place I knew of that sold good telescopes was Xcite in Avenues. But, they no longer seem to carry them anymore so right now if you’re looking for a telescope, your best option is the Abdullah Al Salem Cultural Centre (ASCC).
Inside the space museum at ASCC there is a gift shop that sells Celestron brand of telescopes. Below are the models I spotted along with their prices and a comparison to Amazon.
The pricing seems pretty decent on most of them especially when you consider the Amazon prices I’ve listed don’t include any taxes or shipping costs. So if you’re looking for a telescope, you should head to the space museum gift shop.
Update: If you want to buy a telescope or get into astronomy then check out this local website called Ikarus Tech.
Horologists in Kuwait (all 4 of you) will be interested to know that we’re finally getting a Richard Mille store. While in Salhiya recently I noticed a hoarding up for Richard Mille in place of where the Vertu store used to be located.
Vertu used to be a luxury mobile phone brand but the company shut down a couple of years ago so makes sense that they finally closed the local location as well. I don’t think I had ever seen a single customer inside the store, like ever.
Richard Mille on the other hand is a high end luxury watchmaker with their most affordable watch starting at around KD15,000 (give or take) and can hit a few hundred thousand dinars easily. I was lucky enough to see two Richard Mille models being put together when I visited watchmakers Renaud & Papi in Switzerland a few years ago. Good times.
Not sure when this happened, but the Gazelle Club Facebook group yesterday shared photos of where Gazelle Club used to be located and the buildings have now all been demolished and cleared. They did leave the pier on the other hand which is pictured above.
Gazelle Club was a very popular beach resort in Kuwait back in the 60s and up until the 1990 Gulf War. During the Gulf War the resort was badly damaged and it was never rebuilt again. I’ve posted and shared photos before and after photos on the blog before and you can check those out [Here]
But, I just realized while writing this post that there are a few photos of the club which I had acquired from the KOC Archive which I never shared before. So, I’m also sharing those photos below.
A couple of weeks back, The Regency Hotel got in touch with me and asked me if I’d be interested in experiencing “Le Petit Chef” since they were hosting it in Kuwait for a limited time. I quickly googled it and found the video below and it looked interesting, so I accepted their invitation.
Le Petit Chef is a dining experience based around a mini animated chef and his culinary adventures following the footsteps of Marco Polo. The experience combines 3D projection onto your table and a 6-course meal composed of dishes from around the world. I was told the show was 2 hours long so I had warned my friend we might end up leaving before the show was over if I got bored. Surprisingly, I didn’t and we ended up staying till the very end.
The show started at 8:30PM but we were told to get there early for pre-drinks. The 6-course meal also has an option of drinks to go along with it, and I’m pretty they’re all meant to be alcoholic drinks that were turned into mocktails for Kuwait. When one of the drinks arrived I told my friend it looked like a smoked rosemary whisky sour and when I tried it, I realized it was, just without the whisky of course. At one point during the dinner, the waiter even asked us if we wanted white or red wine with one of the courses. Cute.
Just before the show started we were all led downstairs to one of The Regency’s restaurants which is currently hosting Le Petit Chef. The setup is pretty simple, but it works. Every table had a projector over it that projected 3D footage onto the table. Items like plates and trays get placed in predefined spots on the table so that whatever is being projected looks like it’s interacting with the real physical items.
The show was pretty cheesy, but I actually enjoyed it. The food was ok, nothing really special but I still had a good time because I hadn’t experienced anything like it before. It’s like those restaurants that serve you food in complete darkness or the sub zero ice bars, they’re gimmicks you experience once with a friend, have fun but never go back to. Le Petit Chef is pretty much the same. Two hours ended up flying by without feeling too long nor with me getting bored (which is impressive).
The price, on the other hand, is going to be a bit hard to swallow. The 6-course meal costs KD39 per person, while the accompanying drinks are an extra KD12. So it’s not a place you’d want to take kids to. My recommendation? Skip the drinks, they’re too many and there’s no alcohol involved so you won’t enjoy them. The show is running for a limited time only and takes place daily at 8:30PM except for Sundays. If you’re interested you need to call and book ahead of time on 25766880.
This weekend isn’t as busy as last weekend, but I did find some cool events so there should be enough in the list below to keep you busy. If I missed anything let me know in the comments:
Now that Deliveroo has been operating for sometime I wanted to see how they’d match up with Carriage on delivery speed. So, I decided I’d place an order with both services at the exact same time and see which would get to me faster. The first step was to find a restaurant that was on both services, for that I decided to go with Eighty Six.
I ordered the same item on both Carriage and Deliveroo which was “The Scrambled” sandwich and I put the delivery address as my office which is down the street from Eighty Six.
So which got here faster?
Before placing an order I checked the estimated delivery times on both and they had Eighty Six listed with the following average delivery time:
Deliveroo: 15-25 mins
Carriage: 25-30 mins
Order was submitted at 12:58PM for both.
While tracking the drivers to my office, the Carriage app suddenly stated that the order had been delivered to me. Carriage drivers have a habit of marking an item as delivered before they get delivered which is annoying. Then my phone rang and I looked outside my office and spotted the Deliveroo driver there. So I opened the door and as the deliveroo driver was handing me my order, the elevator door opened behind him and the Carriage driver was there also with my order.
Conclusion of my very unscientific test? Both Deliveroo and Carriage were exactly the same speed in this occasion which is why I feel like I kinda have to turn this experiment into a best of 3. So stay tuned for a second run at this.
When it comes to purchasing video games online locally, my two go-to places are usually GamesQ8 and Alfuhod. They tend to offer prices similar to what you’d find at Rihab Complex, and so are a good alternative to me going there. But, recently another online store popped up called Level-Up that’s run by gamers and has pretty competitive prices. I checked out a few different games and I found that they were usually always cheaper than Alfuhod and sometimes cheaper than GamesQ8. Here are some random examples:
Jump Force (PS4 R2)
Level-Up: KD13.9
GamesQ8: KD15
Alfuhod: KD15.9
Super Mario Bros.u Deluxe (Switch)
Level-Up: KD18.5
GamesQ8: KD16.5
Alfuhod: KD19.5
The one thing to keep in mind though is if you want same day delivery, Level-Up charge KD2.5, but offer free next day delivery. Alfuhod, on the other hand, offers free same day delivery while GamesQ8 charge KD1.
So although Level-Up aren’t always the cheapest, they could be which is why they’re worth checking the next time you want to buy a game online. Here is the link to their [Website]
