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