| rev:text
| - Good, but with a couple kinks that can be easily sorted out.
The food overall was solid. We had the imperial rolls, kohlrabi salad, japchae, and some special with green beans, ground pork, and szechuan peppercorns. The imperial rolls were basically nice egg rolls which you then wrap in lettuce & cilantro. They were good egg rolls. The kohlrabi salad has a good mix of tangy & savory going on, lots of shredded carrot and daikon and heirloom cherry tomatoes. Japchae is a cellophane noodle thing with basically steak and bacon and veggies in it. Steak and bacon and noodles, yes please. I really liked those green beans, whatever the name of that special was. I forget. Nothing was overwhelmingly spicy which is good if you're sharing dishes in a group, and they have hot sauce on the table if desired.
The bar menu has a good selection of perhaps slightly fussy drinks that do taste good. They don't call the bartender a 'mixologist' so the drinks, I'd say somewhere between creative and pretentious. But I'm a little pretentious myself so I can't fault them there. The drinks were good.
Dessert was frozen custard which is a bit incongruous with a bunch of Asian food, but they were at least sorta-Asian flavors like guava and tamarind-coconut-pineapple so not as weird as Asian+custard might sound on the surface. It is a nice way to cool down your mouth after some spicy food, and hey we're in Wisconsin. The girls' night out at the table opposite ours watched very intently as our server brought our two cones out on this cool little cone serving tray. My gf said their heads all moved in unison.
Some of the other reviewers have noted that it's inconsistent, but I spotted Chef Tory by the host stand at one point so I assume since he was in the house the kitchen was on point that night. I can't speak for how things might be another night.
Service was attentive, and our server was very descriptive. All the servers would run food out to the table, I'm assuming they just have whichever server happens to be near the kitchen when an order is up run the food. It's kinda tough to balance how much information is worth sharing when you're describing food in a chef-y place, some people want to know was the pig their pork came from well rested and given lots of blankets to sit on and sung lullabys at night, and not everybody is going to know what all these ingredients are. All of our food was very thoroughly described.
Also, the girl who brought us out our noodley thing then said, "oh, I need to get the scissors for this." My gf and I looked at each other like, "wait did she just say scissors?" The server returned to our table with a pair of kitchen shears in a carrying case back and proceeded to cut up our noodles for us, with scissors. "These noodles start out over 40 feet long," she said, and then returned the scissors to their case and walked away.
If I were to criticize, there are 3 things worth pointing out. Some of them are entirely fixable.
1. We parked in the garage under the apartment building. The kitchen exhaust vents into the garage. There's a good amount of greasy smoke coming out that exhaust. When we pulled in we could smell it in the car and thought 'SMELLS GOOD' but the path from our car to the building entrance led us to walk directly through this smoke cloud. Not pleasant.
2. The entrance from the lobby of the building goes to what I assume is the main dining room. Where's the noodle bar and how do you get there? Is that a separate room with a separate entrance? It wasn't readily apparent and if the noodle bar is a separate space, maybe the hosts should ask if people want the dining room or noodle bar?
3. The only utensils you get are shiny metal chopsticks and these weird spoons that are long like ice cream sundae spoons but kinda wider and flatter like soup spoons. Shiny polished metal chopsticks don't give you as good of a grip on the food as bamboo chopsticks. I'm good with chopsticks and these were a bit of a challenge. The only other option is to use the chopsticks and push food onto your extra-long soup/sundae spoon and shovel it in to your mouth with that, but then you look like a dork, because who eats with an extra-long soup/sundae spoon thingie?
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)