This place looks like it should be in the Meat Packing district...it's very cavernous inside (similar to Buddakhan) and dark with trendy decor and staff in suits and earpieces (unnecessary). The staff was very accommodating to having a baby there and sat us at a nice large table in the front. When I looked at the menu I was confused by their concept: Latin-Asian. To me, those flavors and dishes are pretty different and wasn't so sure what to expect. The menu had a mish-mosh of dishes from Tuna Wonton Tacos to Ceviche to sushi. So yes, you can get a feel of the mix of asian and latin influences. We were told to order 2 appetizers each, so instead we decided to go with 1 app and 1 main entree per person. In all honesty, after we ate, I almost think that was too much. For apps we had the small cut up ceviche, thai chicken empanadas, tuna wonton tacos, duck tacos, and lettuce shrimp wrap (all at about ~$12 each). My favorite was the empanadas...there was a really good coconut/curry flavor to it. The shrimp lettuce came with 3 nice pieces of butter lettuce which I love, but the shrimp was a bit small and it was actually pretty spicy from the chorizo. The tuna wonton taco was ok, I thought that the wonton was too stiff; it was literally like a wonton chip and it cut my mouth. I think I would have preferred it in a soft taco version inside. Which leads me to the duck taco..conceptually, I liked that they were trying to do. A thinly shaved cucumber was the wrap/taco part, which I thought was creative and a nice refreshing touch, but the actual duck was dry and overcooked. When we ordered the ceviche we had the option of the "large chunks" or "small cut up" kind. I think people were turned off by the term "chunks of fish", but I think that probably would have been better. The ceviche was cut up too small and I could barely taste the fish. It just tasted like a lime juice mixture, which is a good base to a good ceviche, but it should be complimenting the fish.
Entree-wise Maggie and Amanda got the scallop dish. For $24 they got 4 pieces of scallop on a bed of seasoned rice. It looked like it would taste good, but I would think for that price there should have been more scallop. I ordered the roasted chicken with garlic yucca fries ($19) which I ordered mainly for the garlic yucca fries part. The chicken was extremely tender and juicy but it was covered in this sweet red sauce and was not what I envisioned when they called it "roasted". Sadly, the yucca fries I was so looking forward to were not good. They were not garlic-y and very dry. I know that yucca is traditionally very hard to cook right and it didn't really work for me here. Jenn got a tofu dish that sounded pretty good on the menu ($17) and Vivi got a chipotle miso soup ($4) and a veggie sushi roll ($10). Vivi was initially a bit unsure about the soup, but the waitress said it was pretty good and Vivi didn't seem to have much complaints afterwards.
We also ordered a bunch of drinks and an order of churros ($8) because we just couldn't say no to dessert. The churros were actually pretty good, but then again it's hard to get fried dough sprinkled with sugar wrong. All in all, I think the food was fairly good and they tried very hard to combine 2 very different cultures, but I thought for what we got it was way overpriced. Everything should have been at least $5-8 less than what it was. This was why I was so confused when our bill came. In my head, I was sure that it was around $45-48/person but then it came out to be $56/pp I ended up tipping our waitress slightly less than 15%. Opps, my bad. I think this place would do much better if it moved to another location in order to justify it's "trendiness" (and therefore, then they could theoretically get away with their prices)
2 comments:
Am I correct that because you miscalculated the price of the meal you downgraded the waitress's tip? Isn't that poor form?
I thought that she had included a 20% gratuity without telling us, which pissed me off. I could have swore that when I got the bill it was $240 but when we got our individual checks they totaled $290....
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