Lunch at Atlantic Cafe, a Cuban cafe at the cold side of Old Town Pasadena. It sure looks too slick to be authentic, but oh well ^^;; I like to go there because it is always the only restaurant with empty tables even on a crazy Friday night (it should be a bad thing ^^;;).
They have very good bread: dry round milky biscuit and golden crispy bread with butter inside (wish I knew their names).
I tend to order the same thing everytime: the Creole-Cuban Fried Rice. It has avacado, plantain (fried banana), shrimp, ham steak, egg, onion and dried-shrimp (just like the Chinese ones). If weren’t the avacado, it seems just like a Chinese + Indonesian dish. ^^;; It’s very strong taste and salty (with soysauce-like flavor?), though the rice is too moist for my Chinese-fried-rice taste background ^^;; Yummy! The drink is Malta con Leche, another item I will always get. They said it’s a popular drink in Cuba: mixed of condense milk with Cuban Malta Soda. It taste like a yummy mixed of coffee + cocoa + soda + this. Though I remember the first time I ordered it they served it to me without milk. The new waitress seems clueless and was asking me how it taste like (with a worried face ^^;;), and kept telling me she tried it and felt it taste like weird tasteless coke. I told her it tasted like that Malt-Vitasoy drink that I grew up with in HK, and told her to serve it with milk. Then she finally woke up, “Oh yeah I forgot, it should be served with condensed milk.”
Tags: Cuban
Is it your lunch on a working day? Is the cafe near your office?
The fried rice sure looks nice!! I am so curious about the taste – what fried banana with rice?! ^^;;;;
The Malt drink is interesting too. Seriously you have so different food culture there~~~Have you tried that “Ravin Red”? Are those bottles of “cream soda” in the pic the Malt-vitasoy tasting soda?
I’m on “holiday” this week since we lost the HGTV job so there’s no work at IF for me right now. 🙁 So I went to lunch by myself. That cafe have fried banana comes with every dish… ^^;; like if it’s a Fish steak there’ll be fried banana on the side. Those Cuban soda in the pic cannot be bought at regular market (maybe at a Cuban market), I assume they used something like that for the malt-milk drink, but I’m not sure which of those sodas are the one they used (cream soda is not malt soda right? I dunno ^^;;). That first time the waitress showed me the bottle but I forgot the name~
i miss the red snapper. It’s a must besides the fried rice. Cuban to me feels like a complicated, spiceful food, but not the fish and fried rice in Atlantic cafe. it is simple with rich *enough* flavor to give you a little bit of everything, well, yeah the saltiness is rather strong. and they do have salt in a small plate with the cute little teaspoon ?!?
when are you going to post julienne?!?
One day we gotta try something else beyond the fried rice and fish 😛
What do you like in Julienne? I’ve always get the lamb sandwich or the quiche, gotta try the entree sometimes!
Hey, I told you my top 3 most favourite food, you should tell me yours too!
Here’s mine: ^^;;
1. olives
2. radish cake (from HK dim-sun)
3. caviar (Russian, Japanese)
You’re the first person I know who likes urchin…
What?? 3 is a surprise!! I like Caviar too but I just have no chance of eating it. Where and how do you have it?
And I thought you would say cake as no.1. ^^;;;
Overall I prefer salty taste over sweet, so no cake (plus it’s rare to eat good cake here ^^;;)
My dad’s assistant is Russian and her mother always visit her from Russia. She’ll always bring caviar as gifts to my dad. So yeah it’s only a luxury craving ^^;;. The everyday subtitle is those Japanese orange beads fish egg (what do you called them in Japanese?), the big one they put on sushi…oh my mouth watered…
You mean “ikura” = salmon roe? Oh I love that too.
When I went to Hokkaido for a tour, I had “three colour rice bowl” where they put crab meat, ikura and urchin on rice. VERY VERY VERY YUMMY!
Yeah Ikura~ addicted to them!! What about the small ones, what do they called? (same or ?) oh I once had “3 color rice bowl” before too.
The small ones are “mentaiko” I think.
(明太子）
or maybe masago? まさご？
you can get those at supermarkets
they’re like ant-size ikuras.
I see them on sushi, with cucumbers.
they’re super bright orange….synthetic looking.
I prefer 明太子 or tarako though, まさご doesn’t look natural ^^;
sigh I’m supposed to be working right now!
I’d rather just space out and think about fish eggs……:0
Yeah yeah masago is the bright orange kind, while Mentaiko is pinkish right? In that case I like the unnatural masago then ^^;; I can eat a spoon full of those (sound gross…)
getting hungry….
it’s 6pm here! I guess I’ll go home and eat 明太子！
didn’t work on anytyhing all afternoon T_T