The new Sang Dao & Extraordinary Desserts (Little Italy location)

[original outing was Thursday, July 2nd]

After finding out from Kirk's blog that Sang Dao had relocated, I just had to check it out... (Kirk's post here , Ed from Yuma's post here, and another one Citybeat's Candice Woo's here):

The new Sang Dao is on 54th and El Cajon...the parking here sucks. You'd be lucky to find a space here!
The interior at the new place is a big improvement from the old location which was in the hood (Logan & National Ave). The tables are now topped with glass and have beautiful plaid textiles serving as tablecloths underneath.
The restaurant isn't huge, but it's big enough to hold large parties. They also sell ready made snacks off to the side and also near the cash register. They have bags of fried taro chips, thinly sliced and fried pig ears, Lao sausage, assorted rice crackers, and some other stuff I only saw briefly. I'll have to buy some of those items next time. The service here was pretty good. Very attentive.
TORC (The Other Rock Chick) had the Chrysanthemum Tea (canned---you can get this flavor as well as tons of others like lychee, dragonfruit, pineapple, etc, at any Asian market BTW)...
We ordered some sticky rice ($2) - this was a huge portion, more than we expected. I was remembering Sab e Lee's "individually" portioned sizes of sticky rice.
We ordered the Pad Lao. It was basically like Pad Thai, except without peanuts and the sauce was different. Sorry for the crappy explanation. There were the thick flat rice noodles, bean sprouts, green onions, chicken, and egg in there. It really wasn't anything special other than we wanted something specifically Lao and something we haven't had before. The elderly man who helped us with the menu was so charming, by the way. He seemed amused that we couldn't decide what we wanted.
This was the Pla Tod - the fried fish. According to the guy (the older man), we could get it as either cat fish or tilapia, so we chose tilapia. Here it is in all of its fried glory and garnished with cilantro. I love eating the fried fish skin, especially the fatty pieces under the belly! Down to the lower left of the photo is the accompanying sauce for the fish...
I also love the fact that the head comes on!!! Just like home! My parents would love this dish!
After our awesome lunch at Sang Dao, we headed downtown to the outskirts of Little Italy on Union Street. This is the second location of Extraordinary Desserts (the first is in uptown on 5th, near Hillcrest). See Yelp reviews here. After circling the block several times trying to find this place, we finally spotted it but had to go around the block again to try to find parking. It was a weekday before 5 pm so the meters and parking Nazis were in full force. That's what I hate about going downtown, parking in metered spaces and feeling pressured because I'm on "the clock".
This was much more expansive, brighter, and slicker than the uptown location, which is crammed into a tiny cottage. This was a huge warehouse with a gorgeous display case of the dessert offerings. Beyond the display cases was the seating area...
More of the counter...
Some sort of rustic tart (forgot what type of fruit fillingthis was):
The bar area...
Some of the seating area was "bar height":
Click to enlarge menu (hopefully it's clear enough). Not only are there desserts here, there are also appetizers and light lunch entrees (sandwiches and such):
TORC had a cappuccino...(cool square coffee pot!):
Here she is again with her dessert, the Lemon Creme Brulee:
More of that dessert - so pretty!
Here's sweaty old me with my dessert - the Passion Fruit Tort.
Man, what a work of art - love what they did with the fruit purees on the plate! It looked too nice to mess up, but yeah, I mangled this! The tart shell was nice and firm. It didn't crumble with the passion fruit filling which was topped with a variety of berries...I ended up eating about half of this.
No spray paint this time. Back to my old censor boxes! This is one of my fave new shirts. It was only $10 at H & M and features the album cover of AC/DC's1979 classic, "Highway to Hell"! Yes, to have Angus Young's scowling visage whilst holding his devil's tail (actually the tail is cut off but you can see the whole image on the real album cover) on a t-shirt is a dream come true!

Love that cheesehole patteron that exterior wall! It's so very Morris Lapidus! We'll have to go here again for lunch...