This review is just for the food. For the full review of my AsiaSF experience, check out my journal entry for that night in San Francisco during my 2015-April trip.
Once you are seated, they hand you a menu to figure out your dinner choices. After a really lame Moulin Rouge experience in Paris many years back with okay show and lame food, I really wasn't expecting anything more than filler to let them serve you even more alcohol -- and I didn't check their website for fine details before I booked. So I was happily surprised with the wealth of options, the fusion menu, and even the fact that they had vegan options!
Three-course Dinner + Burlesque Show for a solo guest at AsiaSF is $48. So how much is just the dinner portion? Even at $48 for a fancy three-course, it was starting to look really decent:
For dinner, solo diners choose 1 of 10 appetizers, 1 of 6 mains, and 1 of 6 desserts. Main were light, but all three courses together added up to a medium meal. Plating is fine-dining worthy. Default utensil is a pair of chopsticks, but you can ask for cutlery.
Potato Samosa Cigars - Filled with spiced potatoes and peas, fried until crisp and served with mango and mint chutney dipping sauces
- Basically three (?) spring rolls pre-cut into 2-bite pieces.
- Samosa style potato fillings.
- Bitter curry. I hate bitter curry. And sadly the sauces didn't help.
- Otherwise, very nicely prepared.
- Sauces useless -- just not very strong. Also, mango dip had pieces of mango (yay) but you were not provided with a spoon (boo).
- I chose the optional vegan preparation for these.
- Yup: Potato stars. French fry-thickness (almost 1 cm thick) potatos cut into 5-pointed star shapes. Bonus points for this fun way to prepare fries!
- I chose medium-rare for the tenderloin of course. Came nicely medium rare and tender, but rather salty.
- Dipping sauce too strong and I recommend passing on that except maybe for the potatoes.
- Miso-glazed eggplant pieces was a pleasant surprise in tastiness and feel in the mouth.
- Quite a largish portion, maybe the size of a tennis ball if I remember correctly.
- Warm cream that looks like a scoop of ice cream was rather yuck. Not spit-it-out yuck, but there is just something wrong about warm cream on a dessert.
- Otherwise a pretty tasty dessert.
It's basically a bar, so as a non-drinker I was really not in the right place. No freshly squeezed juice of course but one of four bartenders managed a nice lemonade (using real lemons, I think).
During dinner, another bartender brought me another lemonade, even before I had fully finished the one I had. When I got the bill at the end of the night, it showed a mere $3.50 charged for one lemonade. Even had I gotten just one glass of that strong-not-lame lemonade, it would still be hands down the cheapest lemonade I'd get during my time in San Francisco and Berkeley in early 2015-April.
Remember that your servers are not the only ones entertaining you that night -- the dancers are as well, so the usual ~15% tip is really inadequate.
During dinner, another bartender brought me another lemonade, even before I had fully finished the one I had. When I got the bill at the end of the night, it showed a mere $3.50 charged for one lemonade. Even had I gotten just one glass of that strong-not-lame lemonade, it would still be hands down the cheapest lemonade I'd get during my time in San Francisco and Berkeley in early 2015-April.
Remember that your servers are not the only ones entertaining you that night -- the dancers are as well, so the usual ~15% tip is really inadequate.
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