Mandalay and such

[mindstalk]

I haven't done a restaurants review in a while.  Briefly: I thought the new noodle place on Kirkwood had a poor selection and a poor veggie pad thai, but I admit I was in a very bad mood when I went  Pita Pit made lyceum_arabica excited but what they gave me was a tasty but appetizer-sized pita, for almost $6.  Not impressed.

But today lyceum and I went to Mandalay's lunch buffet.  The location here is odd: it used to be a Burmese restaurant, then turned into Masala Wok, which was a cool name for Asian fast food but it never actually opened, and now we have Mandalay, another Burmese restaurant.  A bit pricier than I'd like, and the buffet is $9.  But it's *good*.  Fried rice is decent, the white rice is coconut rice, and very tasty by itself; there's a noodle and chicken dish which is bland but still tasty; juicy fried chicken chunks; curried chicken; something beef; nice fried shrimp; and a bunch of fruit -- melon chunks, strawberries, grapes -- for dessert.  Lyceum liked the cauliflower and had some soup, though I was less taken by the cauliflower.  The overall appeal was rather higher than that of Samira or Bombay House buffets, let alone Siam House's. 

I also had Burmese ice coffee, which didn't come like standard Thai ice coffee.  The coffee was in a tin thing on top of the standard tall glass, dripping into a small pool of condensed cream, with the final liquid maybe being 1/3 of the glass.  Then there was a whole bunch of ice.  So it felt less than the usual amount, for $2.25, though Thai ice stuff comes with so much ice it's hard to really compare.  it certainly tasted good.

Oh yeah.  Near the end,  I overhead some women talking, and it seemed like I heard "he's a very religious person... steals a bunch of sodas".

Comments

[fanw.livejournal.com]

Huh, sounds like Burmese ice coffee is a lot like Vietnamese iced coffee (and not very much like Thai iced tea). I've had the little drippy thing over the condensed milk before. (Mmmmm sugar and dairy fat!) Yum!