We had a combined company training with Paprika & Fleishman-Hillard on Friday and Saturday at the Shangrila Putrajaya.

For Shangrila, one would expect ... well ... Shangrila standards.

The hotel was beautiful and the rooms, nice & comfy. The in-room amenities, gush-able as to be expected.

However, the food was MAJORLY BAD!!

They suggested the buffet for all our meals and I'm expecting the spread to be able to accommodate vegetarians since I had made a special request before arriving.

The spread was bad. There was a seriously limited selection of things you could eat if you were a vegetarian.

For lunch I had to make-do with starters and cold dishes. When I got to the hot mains, they apparently didn't have enough as they had run out of the only hot vegetable dish on the spread, thoroughly overcooked broccoli.

For dinner, despite it being a break fast menu, there were only 2 warm vegetable dishes. The meat eaters were the ones who complained that these 2 dishes were VERY oily and they also attested that the other food tasted pretty bad as well.

And every hotel knows you need to pair such tantalising food with singing that's out-of-tune, mispronounced, garbled and just plain awful. It got to a point where we congregated and thought about getting RM50 from each table to give to the singer so he'll STOP SINGING!!!

Breakfast. It's hard to get this meal wrong, right?

Don't put out a cheese plate if you only have 1 type of cheese.

Don't use cheap yoghurt ... or old yoghurt so much so that it tastes like its just about to curdle.

Don't put out fruits that are really old and over-riped.

The ultimate icing on this bad-bad-food-cake is the morning meal of left-overs provided to our muslim colleagues from FH as they prepared to start a day of fasting.

Sigh .... my first official event as a vegetarian and I was hoping a place like the Shang wouldn't fail me.

But I drove home two days later hungry and looking for a decent meal.