Even on those Saturdays when people are actually handed numbers, like in banks, to get a table at their favorite CentralWorld restaurant, Eat’s My World remains often desperately empty. With reason: the food hardly rivals what you’d get from one of those international food courts (and CentralWorld happens to have a rather nice one), it’s more expensive and it takes ages to arrive to your table. Too bad—the decor is rather nice, with its brown and purple tones and that sole window—always a welcome touch in a mall. The entire menu is halal, and it does at least perform the feat of covering most of the globe, with a couple dishes from each destination: Senegal, Vietnam, “the Caribbean” (sic), Morocco, Mexico, America, France, Vietnam, Lebanon, Norway, Italy and Australia. Thailand also gets some eight dishes. On our last visit, one of our co-diners happened to be Vietnamese. “I’m not sure what that’s meant to be,” was his reaction to a plate of sweet, greasy meat with an oily egg—it was beef loc lac. (Although you’d never guess from that dish, the owner is actually Franco-Vietnamese.) But it didn’t take a local to figure out that the dry, insipid kefta balls and their side of fries would not get rave reviews in Beirut. Not everything is this bad. We’ve had more luck with the Senegalese chicken yassa, creamy bordering on oily, and eggplant cake, crisp and flavorful. In general, stick to African and French dishes, like the Moroccon tagine (with a real clay pot and really sad bread) and the “French” chicken with potatoes and cream. The Mexican and American dishes are best avoided altogether. A halal restaurant was long overdue for CentralWorld, but if you’re simply drawn to food from the four corners of the globe, there are better (and sometimes cheaper) places to enjoy it. Also, it might come without the ten-minute wait between each dish or the moments where servers are all focused on something behind the bar that’s much more interesting than you, waving desperately from the only occupied table. (No alcohol, of course, and we never managed to get the free wifi to work on our last visit.)
