Yet more changes at Asia Cafe

TC and I were out and about one day and had a craving for Laotian food...

This could only mean one thing...


a visit to Asia Cafe where we were greeted with this NEW menu.

Here is their previous menu for comparison...

(photo from my "New soon to be favorite at Asia Cafe + price hike in their menu", December 9, 2014)

Not only was the yellow covered menu new, but the prices were as well!  Most were raised slightly. I was still happy to see that the Lao sausage remained at $7 for 3 links.  In comparing the menus, a few items were omitted and funnily enough, some menu descriptions which had misspellings remained the same (ex: beef gusts for beef 'guts', grounded meat for 'ground', etc)

Sorry, I thought I took a photo of the page which included #'s 15 - 28! Oops!



I thought the inclusion of "Sukiyaki" soup was kind of odd, since the word 'sukiyaki' is Japanese and not Laotia.

They still had their extensive condiment tray - chili garlic sauce, Sriracha (the original kind this time), Hoisin, fermented shrimp paste (that stuff was strong!!!) and chili garlic oil. There was also another container with chopped peanuts (not shown).

This is stronger than bagoong!

In the cold case were giant kegs of pickled carrots and radish.

For old time's sake and also force of habit, we ordered the nem khao. This is how it looked.  Wow. so much "browner" than I remembered it to be. In fact, I thought they used brown rice for this but they didn't (I actually asked!).


While it was crunchy, it lacked the combination of flavors I liked so much the first time we tried it back in 2006.  After the owners retired late last year, the new chefs probably put their own spin on the dish, using their own family recipes.  I'm sad to say that this was not that great.

TC wanted the spring rolls and here they were - kind of sloppily wrapped. They were okay but not spectacular.

Since we haven't had it in a while, we ordered the fried tilapia. Here is was, served with two types of sauces, a light fish sauce and another that was more sweet and sour. I had to remind the young man about the sauces. The menu description mentioned them but the fish was served without them. As I was poking around the fish, I noticed something...

Blood....which I saw underneath the spine...


I had to call back the young guy to point it out to him. He seemed flustered and finally said he would make it 'half off' (what?). I just asked him if the kitchen could just take it back and refry it. When he brought back the refried fish, he apologized and said that should never have happened.  I don't know, is it just me being picky or what, but I couldn't bring myself to eat this fish even after it was refried. For the record, Bert ate it the next day.

When I checked the receipt, I noticed that our server crossed out the fish, which was a nice gesture. That was $7 saved.  It wasn't very pleasant cutting into that fish and seeing the juicy red blood, ugh.


Previous visit to Asia Cafe:
December 12014 in which we tried the Nem Pa

It was two strikes that day. Maybe we should have stuck with the Lao sausage. I may need to find another Lao place whose nem khao matches up to the old Asia Cafe chef's version...