Patsara Thai Restaurant - New Westminster

I was out for a walk with a friend one day in New Westminster and he pointed out that there was a Thai restaurant in the purple building.  Wow, I was quite surprised it was a restaurant as there were hardly any signs or menus on the building to indicate that it was a restaurant.  I went inside to take a copy of their menu home to view.  Immediately I saw they had quite a good selection of value lunch specials for $8.50.

I headed back there a week later with some friends to try out the place.

The interior looks clean and modern with some hints of Thai ornaments decorating the restaurant.

This is their lunch special menu with pictures:

All of the lunch special meals include a free spring roll. 

It's a vegetarian spring roll with assorted veggies and vermicelli. The spring roll tasted quite good as it was fresh out the fryer and was not overly cooked.

For most of the lunch meals, you can choose your mean (beef/pork/chicken). some you can choose shrimp.  The server also asked our preference for spiciness (mild/medium/hot).

This is the pad thai with shrimp:

This was a good lunch size portion for one person.  It came out steaming hot.  I did not try the pad thai but the comment I head  was that it was a bit too salty.

This is the Panang curry with beef. 

We were unsure what this was since it looked similar to the red curry from the pictures.  The server explained it contained extra spices as well as some cream.

I asked for medium spicy.  It also came piping hot with a good size bowl of rice.The curry was very creamy, a bit of an orange colour which reminded me of a squash soup.  It had a deep taste and smell from the extra herbs.  Overall the flavour was good as long as you have it with rice.  It is a bit salty too though.  But the rice helps dilute the saltiness.   The beef was a tad too chewy.  I'm not sure of the beef used, but it tasted like the type used for beef fried noodle at Chinese places.

This is the lettuce wrap with chicken.  It was not from the special lunch menu.

It was also a good sized portion.

Finally this is just another shot of the spring rolls when ordered separately as an appetizer.  It includes 4 pieces as well as a small salad on the side. 

The service here was good as the servers were quite attentive and kept our waters topped up.  The food also came out fast and fresh. We knew the food was fresh as we can hear the food getting fried up from the kitchen in the woks.  Some of the dishes were a bit too salty though so it masked the better tasting curry spices. 

However we are not deterred at all. We will still come back to try other dishes but I think I would request less salt at the time of ordering just to be safe next time.

This place has good value choices for lunch and looking at their regular dinner, the prices are not over the top either.

SFDD gives 3.5 out of 5 Delights.

Banh Mi Bar - New Westminster

Banh Mi Bar opened sometime during the Summer 2016 and we had a few chances to try it out. It is about a block away from Douglas College.

Banh Mi Bar is run by a young and very friendly couple.  It has a simple menu with about 6 or 7 different varieties of the typical banh mi flavours you can find elsewhere.  This is a small shop with just a few counter seats available if you want to stay and eat.  Most people I’ve seen usually get take out.

I ordered the chicken banh mi.  Like others, it’s made to order and has the usual toppings like cilantro, cucumber, pickled carrots and radish.   They will ask if you want jalapeno too.

The banh mi is presented reasonably nice in a plastic basket  The bread is very fresh while crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside.  I also like the sauce that was used.  It is kind of like mustard sauce which I don’t recall having tried before at other banh mi places. Perhaps this is their special secret sauce.

Overall, the prices here are quite reasonable and the sandwiches are quite fresh.  They have a stamp program where you get a free sub after X number of purchases. It’s good to have something different in this neighborhood.

SFDD gives 4 out of 5 Delights.

Boston Pizza - New West Queensborough

We visited Boston Pizza (BP) to try out their $10 lunch specials being promoted since Fall 2016.  I think this is our first time visiting BP.  We arrived just before noon and the restaurant was still quiet.  We were seated promptly.

There was quite a variety to choose from in their $10 half time lunch specials.

The first lunch plate we chose was the roasted Veggie and Pesto flatbread.

This was presented beautifully with a generous amount of fresh toppings.  It was cooked perfectly.  The flat bread was very fluffy as well.  The size is probably equivalent to a small pizza.

The second plate we chose was the Thai chicken wrap paired with a side salad. 

This was not part of the $10 lunch menu but the price was just a couple of dollars more.

There was lots of chicken breast strips inside the wrap.  The lettuce and onions were also quite fresh.  The Thai part of this wrap was the fried crunchy noodles and Thai chili sauce.  This tasted quite good.  The side salad was also quite fresh.

Unfortunately, we found something wrong with the 2nd half of the wrap (hair).  However, they corrected this issue for us right away when we brought this to the attention of the server.

Service was quick and friendly and the food was quite good (except for the hair).  I’m sure this was just an isolated incident.  We still would like to visit BP again to try their other $10 half time choices for lunch.  Probably we would visit another location.

SFDD gives 3 out of 5 Delights.

Charcoal Sushi & BBQ Restaurant - Richmond

It’s been a while since we were back here at Charcoal.  They are located in the London Drugs Plaza on No 3 Road and Westminster Hwy, directly across from the London Drugs store.  We went here for an early lunch just after 11am on Sunday.  It looks like it just opened for the day as not too many tables were taken.

They have a special lunch menu which consists of a main course, miso soup and a side appetizer which you are free to choose a combination as you like.

The miso came first and was nice and hot. 

It was not too salty and tasted a lot better than the miso soup you get from AYCE places.  It had some green onions and some small pieces of tofu on the bottom.

We ordered 2 lunch specials.  For the appetizers, we chose the pan fried gyoza.

The skin was nice and chewy and the meat inside was flavorful.  It was pan fried on one side for a slight crisp and was not too oily at all.

For the second appetizer we got the fried tofu.

The tofu squares were fried perfectly to a golden crisp color and the tofu inside was fresh and soft.  It had some spicy powder sprinkled on top for some extra flavor.

For the mains, we got the chicken yakisoba.

We were quite surprised that they served it on a hot sizzling cast iron plate.  The noodles were nicely done to an al dante like texture.  It was a bit on the sweet side but luckily it had lots of veggies to complement the noodles.

Next we got the fish curry.

Similar to the fried tofu, the fish was fried to a perfect golden crisp.  Perhaps the oil was still fresh since we were one of the first few customers for the day.  You get four big round pieces and a serving of rice.  Japanese style curry is normally not very spicy and is thicker than Thai or Malaysian curry.

Overall the food was good and was economically priced at about $10 each.  We did not have to wait long for the food.  Parking can get hectic in the London Drugs plaza because it has other restaurants, such as 2 separate dim sum places that make the mall rather busy on weekends.

SFDD gives 4 out of 5 Delights.

Thai Box 2Go - New Westminster

Thai Box is a small family run Thai restaurant along 6th St in New West. We got there just past noon on Friday for lunch and found the restaurant was rather quiet so we had our pick of seats.  You can find plenty of street parking in the residential side streets.  It’s pay parking if you want to park right outside the restaurant.

The restaurant had lot of Thai decorations all around.

We saw their menu ahead of time and were targeting their $10 set lunch specials. 

There were 4 of us and we all chose something different.

With each dish, you can choose your meat or vegetarian option.  All of the dishes we ordered came with 2 fried dumplings.

Pad Thai with chicken:

The pad thai was not flavoured very well. It was way too sweet.  The noodles were not too overcooked while portion wise, it was reasonable for $10 lunch 

This is the yellow curry chicken. 

It includes a serving of rice.  My lunch mates commented that it was good.

This one is the green curry chicken and my lunch mate also mentioned it was good.

Thai Box had nice presentation for their dishes.  Their prices were reasonable and the server was very polite. They even offered to split the bill for us.  As a bonus they accept credit cards which is rare for Asian restaurants.  The pad thai can use some improvement in terms of flavor balancing.

SFDD gives 3 out of 5 Delights.

Sushi Yen - New Westminster

A couple of my friends and I were craving for some sushi so we checked out this relatively new Sushi place on 6th Street in New West.

We got there on Friday just a few minutes past noon and the restaurant was rather quiet since they usually open at 11:30am.  We were seated in a cozy corner giving us a good overview of the restaurant.

According to the menu, all orders come with a free miso soup.  So we got a few of these served with our order.  My friend commented that this is the sweeter type of miso soup. I don’ t think I’ve tried it before but it was indeed, less salty and had a tad of sweetness to it.  It had not seaweed in it, but some visible pieces of tofu.

We ordered some fried octopus (karaage). It came with a spicy mayo dipping sauce.  The octopus came fried in a very light batter so it was quite good.

We ordered a couple of their knock off Japadogs to share. This one is the Orishi Ponzu.  It has some grated daikon inside of it.  I thought the raw daikon was a bit strange, I usually have it cooked and never had it inside a hot dog before.  Both of the hotdogs had a thick full sized wiener.

This one is the Teri-Mayo.  It had a couple of different sauces inside and similar to the one above it had seaweed scattered on the top.

This is Korean Style fried chicken. There are a couple of flavours to choose from.  We got the sweet and spicy  one.  It comes with about 12 large pieces. They are boneless and had a light batter with some sesame sprinkled on top.  It had a unique zing to it and was complemented well with the sweetness too.  It was not overly saucy too.  This dish would have went well with a bowl of rice.

We also got a BC roll to try.  It was a bit small.  They put some sweet sauce on the top which tasted well with the salmon inside the BC roll.

This restaurant appears to be family run.  Service was attentive but one hiccup was that they could not provide us with a table knife as we wanted to cut the hotdog ourselves.  The server was apologetic about not having a knife available so we didn’t think much of it.

We’d certainly like to come back soon to try their other Korean style fried chicken as that was the best part of our meal.

SFDD gives 3.5 out of 5 Delights.

Aladdin Cafe - Downtown Vancouver

Aladdin is a Shawerma wrap shop located on the quieter part of Robson Street.  It is about a block east of Pacific Centre Mall on the North side of Robson.  We passed by this shop many times before and finally had the courage to give it a try.  In the past, we would frequent Babylon on Robson, but that place has disappeared years ago.

Their prices were rather reasonable.  They were slightly cheaper than the food truck parked outside the art gallery that had a similar menu.  Given the choice, we’d rather come to Aladdin since comfortable seating is available.

We ordered the chicken with all the trimmings

You can’t see it in the above pic, but they were rather generous with the chicken when loading up the pita pocket.  It also had the usual lettuce, tomato, onions and hummus.

Here is how it kind of looks a quarter way into the wrap:

What we would have preferred is that the chicken was sliced off fresh off the oven.  For our orders, we saw that the chicken was already precut into a big bowl.  It would have been better if the chicken could be more hot.

Aladdin also has a wide selection of canned and bottled sodas.  Some were imported which we’ve never seen before.  The Coke machine looked quite sleek with a low profile design.  We had to get a pic of it.

What we noticed is that this place is very very clean.  Throughout our visit, we saw one of the employees continuously wiping tables, floor and the glass.  The shop was quite shiny.  It’s good to see the owners taking extra effort to upkeep their shop.

Overall prices are reasonably good and the service is fast.  It would have been a better Shawerma if the meat was sliced at the time the order is placed.  This is a pleasant place to get a quick bite to eat while you take a break from shopping downtown.

SFDD gives 3.5 out of 5 Delights.

KFC - Burlington, WA (USA)

On our way back from our shopping trip, we stopped by Burlington to for a late lunch at KFC. This KFC is strange looking because it is a hybrid with A&W.  The restaurants aren’t even separated. You can order from the A&W menu or the KFC menu at the till.

We ordered a couple of $6 lunch box specials.  The lunch box comes with a drumstick and a thigh, mashed potatoes and gravy, a biscuit, a cookie, and a fountain drink.  On top of that, we ordered a “KFC Go Cup” which is in the middle of the picture below.

We ordered the extra crispy recipe. It was quite a big meal as you can see.

The fried chicken was quite fresh out of the fryer. We know because we had to wait a few minutes for our meals to be ready.

The Go Cup consisted of wedge fries and a choice of chicken products that was listed on the menu like chicken strips, mini chicken sandwich, popcorn chicken etc.  We chose popcorn chicken.  We thought the popcorn chicken was a bit overly breaded.  No big deal, this Go cup was only a couple of bucks.

Overall the restaurant was rather clean and organized. The staff were quite friendly and efficient too.

SFDD gives 3.5 out of 5 Delights.

Cheesecake Factory - Bellevue

We were back in the USA for some shopping, despite the weak Canadian dollar we still found good deals such as $0.62/ltr gas and LED light bulbs.  We ventured out as far as Bellevue Square mall where we lunched at the CK Factory.  We’ve blogged about this place couple years back so it was time for an update.

We didn’t want to eat too much lunch since we planned on having some cheesecakes afterwards for dessert.

We ordered from their special lunch menu where the portions are a bit smaller.

This is the soup and salad combo.  Soup of the day was baked potato soup. It was very rich, creamy and filling.  It was like eating a fully loaded tomato since it had all the fixings.

The salad was very fresh and crisp.  They usually include at least half a tomato cut into big wedges.

We also ordered the lunch pizza and salad special.  This seems to be a new addition to the lunch menu as we didn’t recall seeing this in the past.  You can choose any pizza, so of course we chose the everything pizza.

It had peperoni, sausages, onions, yellow pepper and mushrooms.  It looked nice but I think they left it on the counter too long so part of the crust on the bottom was soggy.  The size of this pizza was somewhere between a personal pan pizza and a small pizza.

It also came with a salad which was fresh and crispy like the one above with big wedges of tomato.

We had 2 bonus slices of cheesecake gifts, but we were too full to cash in both.  We shared the red velvet cheesecake. It was quite superb as usual.

The 2nd cheese free cheesecake we ordered it to go and chose just the regular cheesecake.  That was also still very good when we ate it in the evening.

Service was good as they have many staff on duty.  If it weren’t for the soggy pizza crust, we would have given it more Delights.

SFDD gives 3 out 5 Delights.