Asian Fest

A belated review finds many positives in execution

I don’t know how much good there is in reviewing Asian Fest after it already happened, but since it’s of culinary worth, and many of the stands come back in following years, I felt it worth covering. Asian Fest is great place to spend a couple of hours—sit back, watch a performance or two, poke around the booths, grab a bite to eat, and watch some sepak takraw, the amazing soccer-volleyball backflipping sport of southeast Asia. But stay any longer than three hours or so and it begins to wear on you. So you go back to get more food. And what options you have! Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino, Thai, Laotian, Japanese, and Cambodian are all well-represented here. Take a lap and see what looks best.

If I recall correctly, the place was called Jenny’s Vietnamese—they definitely didn’t have an affiliated restaurant, I remember that much. It was in the northern most part of the food place, on the western half…but enough about names and geography. I picked this place solely on how great their chicken looked on the grill. They were grilling up short ribs and what looked like chicken wings (what I soon found out were chunks of chicken, maybe thighs. These were glazed in a salty sweet sauce and charred very well. The short ribs on the other hand…they were charred, too, but there was very little meat on the bone, and you had to pick through a lot of fat. The chicken was spot on, however.

The fantastic appetizer set the bar high for the rest of the day. Later I got a dish at a Korean stand (blanking on the name) that was just grilling up a lot of spicy pork and bulgogi (marinated barbecued beef). The spicy pork, which was marinated in pretty much the same stuff that cabbage is marinated in for kimchi, was fantastic. Giant curling slices were soft, flavorful with the marinade, and spicy. This was great execution, and easily worth the five dollars that it cost by itself, although I’d recommend getting some rice or a side dish with it. The bulgogi was a little tough, unfortunately. Bulgogi normally looks something like meat you’d find on an Italian beef sandwich—thinly sliced sirloin. The beef was, unfortunately, nowhere nearly as flavorful as the spicy pork. The kimchi was what kimchi should be—pickled and spicy, crunchy and sour, disgusting and delicious all at the same time.

And for dessert? One of the unconventional stands, the Filipino La Herba Buena, provided the goods. I stopped in once a few years ago, and the place offers some pretty funky imported stuff, including some pretty exotic drinks and frozen ice cream pops (I recall calamansi soda, for some odd reason). Apparently the specialty store also has a little restaurant in it, too. Well, I digress. The crushed ice with tapioca was, simply, crushed ice with tapioca balls at the bottom, and covered in a liquid that I can only describe as syrup-flavored. Still pretty refreshing on an 80 something degree day, but not necessarily something that I’d order again. The banana fritter, however, was a very good, two bite chunk of banana deep-fried. A nice, simple, and delicious end to a rewarding day at Asian Fest.

Look out for Asian Fest, May 2010

Franklin Park

La Plaia

Good ingredients and sauces, but value and menu underwhelms…

La Plaia encapsulates the unlikely. The restaurant is in the very back of the Columbus Square, where culinary delights abound—Mi Li’s for Vietnamese, Yuen’s for Vietnamese/Chinese, the newly-moved Smackie's Barbeque, and Nazareth Deli for Middle Eastern. Based on a recommendation, and considering my luck with restaurants in this strip, I figured I had a good shot of finding a gem in La Plaia. The restaurant is as unassuming as they come; it didn’t even look open when I arrived. Despite the unassuming outside, the inside is very dressed up. White tablecloths adorn tables and a skinny long aquarium splits the room in half. But in the first instance of unlikeliness, I was asked by the waitress, “do you have a reservation?” I scanned around the room, seeing that my surroundings were a little fancier than what I expected, but I scratched my head. It was 7:30 and there was one table occupied in the restaurant. I shook my head no, thinking that she might have possibly been joking, and she replied, “that’s okay,” and showed me to my table. Was this restaurant tricking itself into thinking that it was better or more successful than it was? Does everyone just come in at 9? A funky musty smell also hit me as I walked to the table.

Based on location and other factors, I was expecting a casual, moderately priced Italian restaurant. Instead, I was struck with forty five dollar price tags for veal chops and NY strip steak. Not ready to judge…quite yet. Salad and bread came out after the order was taken. The salad was nearly great—fresh field greens, an olive oil/lemon dressing and a fresh slice of beefsteak tomato all added up to a solid start to the meal. But the first taste on the tongue is…salt. Quite unfortunate, especially because it’s a salad; this is a dish usually not salted. All the elements of a good salad were there, and the slice of tomato was outstanding (they really take pride in their ingredients at La Plaia), but it was difficult to get over the saltiness. And so the theme of a restaurant “trying to be something that it’s not” continued throughout the meal. The bread that came with the salad looked like it was hard and crusty from the outside, but was soft and chewy and had no give to its crust (and for a restaurant serving $45 veal chops, butter packets? Really?). And the pasta on the menu is not homemade, according to the waitress, but the only pasta certified by the blahblahblah in Italy. Sorry, but the crudest version of homemade pasta is more impressive than the most expensive, finest box of pasta from Italy. The discrepancy between price and preparation causes the average diner to consider the word value throughout the whole meal. The waitress was sure to reassure, “all of our pasta sauces are homemade by the chef, everyday.” Better be the best darned sauce I’ve ever had to warrant sixteen dollar tortellini…

The Chicken Philippo was pan seared chicken breast in a white wine butter sauce and served with a slice of prosciutto over it, cheese, and diced tomatoes. The sauce was very nice, flavorful but not overwhelming. Tomatoes were fresh, but between the cheese and prosciutto and the seasoning of the dish, it was salty. Can you fault the chef if it was the prosciutto that made it salty? The thinly sliced Italian cured ham really wasn’t necessary in the dish. Also, a promised kick of spiciness with hot peppers never showed itself. I think the dish might deserve some pasta to go under it, too—it would at least make the value of the dish fairer.

Tortellini with peas and mushrooms was good, but nothing outstanding. Pasta dishes get a choice of sauce on the side, and so for the tortellini, it was the Ameritriciana sauce—tomatoey with a kick of habanero pepper and speckled with Romano cheese. The sauce was very good, more complex than the average tomato sauce, but the tortellini forgettable—peas and mushroom were on top, not inside, as one might think. And so you think, 16 dollars? Is it really worth the money for a good sauce but the rest of a dish I can make at home? The potato gnocchi with the house tomato sauce played out the same way. Again, a very capable sauce, but the doughy gnocchi was not outstanding in any sense. Portions on this dish and the others are probably more than they need to be; I came away feeling overstuffed after the meal was done.

One almost gets the feeling that La Plaia is fooling themselves. The waitress believes the restaurant to be the most popular, fanciest restaurant in the city, which it is clearly not. The chef believes the food to be gourmet, but it won’t be until they start going the extra mile outside of getting gourmet ingredients. And the menu is priced according to the gourmet, fancy standards that La Plaia doesn’t quite live up to. La Plaia could have been the golden nugget of a restaurant hidden in a strip mall, but it was fool’s gold all along…