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| - Asia Plaza is home to our favorite dim sum spot (Li Wah) and our favorite Asian supermarket (Park to Shop), so we were very excited to see the that there was going to be a new restaurant opening in the facility, and we eagerly anticipated the opening of the E 30th Street Cafe.
In Cleveland, Asian restaurants that cater to the palates of Asian clientele are few, and given the location, we were hopeful this would be a place to add to our repertoire of Asian dining options
The interior was pleasant enough - it was clean and modern, but that's about where the positive aspect of the dining experience ended. Things began to head south when our waiter, a youngish Asian man, approached simply reeking of cigarettes and with an oral hygiene issue that would cause fainting spells in most dental professionals. I should note here that I was dining with my partner who is also Asian, and has more tolerance than I do for the niceties that one is accustomed to in most Western restaurants, and even he was rather disturbed by this waiter.
Because his English was very challenged, my partner ordered for us in Mandarin. It was a cold winter day out, so we both decided to go for soup. I ordered the Hong Kong Style Beef Tendon Soup and he got the Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup. We also ordered some scallion pancakes, which are a great accompaniment to soups.
There were only about 3 other tables that were occupied, and it was pretty much exclusively by Caucasians. Given the light crowd, the wait for food wasn't bad - about 10 minutes, and we entertained ourselves with the cheesy Chinese soap operas that were playing on the big screen TV.
My soup came out first, accompanied by the order of scallion pancakes. Immediately I noted a "off" smell coming from my soup. It looked fine, if plain, but it didn't smell right to me. Shortly thereafter the waiter brought out my partner's soup, and it pretty much smelled the same as mine. For those who are unfamiliar with Chinese style soups, ours should have been very different, and yet is was as though they threw a few different contents into the same soup broth and called them by separate names. The broth was bland, virtually transparent and just didn't taste right, We both tried adding soy sauce, vinegar and other condiments to liven it up, but nothing really served to improve the flavor, or lack thereof, of our respective soups.
Fortunately, the scallion cakes were there to cleanse our palates and they tasted just fine, but I did find them to be disappointingly small.
Neither of us finished our soups; it just wasn't worth it. The only saving grace, if you can call it one, is that the prices were pretty low. The soup was $6.95 each, if I recall correctly, so it was no great financial loss.
I think the E 3th Street Cafe may suffer from an all-too-common Asian restaurant syndrome of trying to be everything to everyone. The menu included sushi, dim sum, and an array of foods from different Asian countries. They also had the sickly sweet and goopy Chinese-American foods that no Asian born person would recognize as being part of their culinary heritage.
You may have noted that the breadth of our food selection was rather limited, but based on what we saw other people order and what we tasted, we both felt confident that additional visits wouldn't change our minds about it. I don't want to see them fail, and I hope for their sake they learn to focus on the things they do well (not sure what that might be), and drop the ancillary stuff. Hopefully, someday soon, an Asian friend will come to us and say, "I found the greatest place for ..." and then we might give E 30th Street Cafe another chance ... but not without much skepticism.
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