Final Thoughts: 4.30/5
We came here for a simple dinner because there was a boba spot that we wanted to try nearly. Quite crowded for a Friday night. Once we were actually inside, the experience went smoothly. Nothing too notable. Just another casual dinner for my friends and I.
Food:
Crab Fried Rice: 3.9/5
This is their pan-fried jasmine rice with crab meat, egg, and yellow, and green onions. Seems like a simple enough dish. The seasonings are interesting. The rice has all of the seasoning and they seemed to hold off on all additional seasonings with the crab. To get the best balance of flavors, my recommendation is to mix everything together before consuming. Initially, we just ate it as it came out without mixing, and it was so unbalanced because the rice had all of the seasonings while the crab had none. There's some cucumber slices for crunch and freshness, but I would really prefer the Persian cucumbers. While the seasonings and flavors were there, it was just a little bit too salty for me. I'm definitely not one to salt my food this much, so I didn't each much of this dish compared to the other two.
Chicken Massaman Curry: 4.2/5
This dish has chicken thigh in coconut milk curry with potatoes, peanuts, tamarind, and aromatics. They serve it with roti and picked cucumbers. This dish was definitely my favorite. The cut they use is chicken thigh, so it is naturally very tender and just pulls apart. The flavor of the chicken was also nice. That combined with the curry sauce was nice. The roti was crispy and warm. They are a little oily for me, which seems like a normal thing, but I'm just not used to it. The curry sauce was well seasoned and had all of the nice spices incorporated. Perhaps this is not the usual, but I just prefer a thick curry versus a thinned out curry. I think it just coats the meat and I can get more when I dip the roti. Not the biggest concern here because the flavor compensated for it.
Pad Thai with Pork: 4.0/5
Second favorite was the pad thai. This is their traditional Thai-style pan-fried rice noodles with egg, tofu, bean sprouts, and green onions. They garnish with fresh bean sprouts, crushed peanuts, and lime. Caution the peanut allergy here. Of note, my friend dislikes bean sprouts, so we typically ask for them to remove that. We chose pork for protein today and it was quite nice. There seems to only be a few pieces of meat, but we had other proteins in the other dishes. The flavor of this dish was really nice and balanced. I like that they seem to use fresh red Thai chilis versus a paste. You can visually see them in the dish too. There is a kick to it, for me, it wasn't overpowering.
Menu: Easy to Navigate
Their menu looks very simple and their labels/titles are very clear. I like that it is easy to navigate versus some menus looking like a wall of text. Something I also appreciate is their descriptions for each of the items. Helps to visualize each dish.
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Quality: Made to order
These foods came out nice and hot and I did almost burn my tongue on one of them. Not quite ideal, but I like that each dish does come out fresh to order. We did have a little bit of a waiting time, but it seemed worth it in the end.
Price: Average
Their prices do seem to be average priced items for what is sold. Their portion sizes seem appropriate too. The price range will be around $15 to $20 with a few outlier dishes. This seems normal in the bay area these days.
Service/Waiting/Reservations: Simple and fast
The service was fairly quick. Note that they do not have a yelp wait list, but they do allow you to make reservations on their website. When we got there, we added our names to the waitlist and stepped out. They were fairly quick with the service and nice overall.
Ambiance: Average restaurant
Pretty average restaurant. Our table was placed at a very questionable spot though? The other tables seemed like they fit in as a seating table and that's not to say ours was not. It was just placed in a more questionable area. At first, I kind of liked it because we had our own table that was away from the rest of the tables, but my friend pointed out that we are in fact within fairly close proximity to the restroom area. We were far enough and there's this invisible divider, but he was correct about the location being more awkward than anything. Yes, we did have this space around us to ourselves, but there were times where it felt a little off with people just walking in a out of the restroom around us while we were eating.
Location/Parking: Big enough parking area
This place is located at the corner intersection of Prospect Road and Lawrence Expressway. Cere Tea is located in the same plaza and they have a Trader Joes within the plaza right across from here. The parking space seems optimal. We don't usually have a hard time finding a space here. There are some spaces farther back too, but we usually can find on closer to the front. read more