Cafe Ophelia

The first thing that struck me when we walked in was «are the lights broken?» It’s extremely dim inside, a stark contrast to the afternoon California sunlight (we came in for late lunch). The seats are worn down but not dirty, and still pretty comfortable.
Looking over what everyone ordered, I’d say the best value/​choice would be the combo meals which come with rice, soup, and three decently sized side dishes (and it’s hard to fck up meat with sauce?). My dad’s eel looked pretty decent and he was satisfied.
The Salmon Asparagus Fried Rice my brother got was another story. the salmon is shredded so much we had a hard time finding it amidst the rice, and the dish overall was really really dry. Large portion, enough for two, but very dry.
I wasn’t very hungry so much as thirsty as we’d just walked Mission Peak so I went with Cream of Corn Soup with Puff Pastry — ’cause who doesn’t love puff pastry…- and an order of chicken nuggets. Chicken nuggets? Random, out of place menu item, but whatever. The corn soup was thankfully not overly starchy, and the chicken nuggets were crispy but not oily. (An order is twelve nuggets, btw)
Service is extremely quick, so if you’re looking for a quick, no-​fuss meal and aren’t terribly picky… well, this is your place.

Should have trusted the bad reviews in this case. We had the chefs special for the day and it didn’t even look appetizing to start with. Food was quite bland. I’m not a good cook and the food tastes worse than my cooking.
The soup is starchy and tasteless. Just nothing we tasted was worth it. Yes and it’s way too expensive for the quality of food you get here.
Sadly I don’t think this place is going to survive much longer… We should have known when we walked in and the place was empty (bad sign when you walk into an asian restaurant during lunch time).

Well well, I could’ve sworn I wrote a review for Café Ophelia already! No matter, the time of overlooking this hole in the wall café has ended!
Alrighty then, lets begin
The Atmosphere:
One word: Fancy.
Damn fancy for a milk tea café place. They have a bunch of tables where you can sit and the lighting is mild. They also make use of lots of mirrors to give the illusion that the café is bigger than it really is. Oh typical Asians, always with that trying to make things better than what it is BS.
Be careful of the really big mirror (yes, its actually a mirror) next to the bathroom. As I was walking to go wash my hands, I noticed that it was actually a mirror I was walking into! I was literally 1 inch away from it. The thing covers the whole wall! Omg no wonder that ravishing guy looked so much like me. Well enough of my embarrassing mishaps.
Service:
Cute. The chinese ladies here are so nice! They don’t give any attitude whatsoever. I tend to be the type of person who stares into space with a mean look. Unfortunately one of the waitresses was in my line of view and it was obvious that I was giving her the WTF staredown. She still remained courteous and approached me as if I never gave her the stare of death. They are also very helpful and will recommend you items which are popular. Yayyy for chinese ladies!
Food:
Great! Its a little pricey for what it is but most of the items are worth it. I usually get the combos which include a meat dish, rice, 3 side dishes, and tee a for 11 bucks. You can also upgrade to any milk tea for about 1 – 2 more dollars. This is totally worth it because the milk tea here is served in cute cups! Who doesn’t like things served in cute things!
Overall: This place is worth hitting up. Its on the pricey side but the ambience and service definitely make up for the premium price!

My family and I have loved coming to this place since we moved to the area (more than 10 years ago). Reading the other negative reviews even makes me a little bit sad, as this is a childhood favorite. Café Ophelia is cutely furnished, though their furniture have started to show their age. I do love the mood lighting and the Chinese magazines they have on a rack near the front door.
My favorite meals to order are the specials on the front page. The western meals come with soup, salad, fruit, a massive entrée, and a drink. The food is really nothing special but to me, it’s really excellent comfort food. The entrees come with corn, bread, pasta, and more, so I usually end up taking half of it home. The Chinese entrees come with three side dishes, soup, an entrée, and a drink. Both types of meals are good deals for just around $ 10.
This place is open a little later than is typical, so my parents and I used to love coming here for hot pot (about $ 20, and enough for two people) at 9 PM or so.

I really like this classy Chinese restaurant! Their combo entrees are quite delicious and it comes with a free tea. You can upgrade it to their milk tea for about a dollar or two more and I totally recommend it. Their boba comes in a glass cup and it makes for a great boba drinking experience :)
Their combo entrees come with a lot of items. The main entrée I get is the hainan chicken with the garlic onion oil dipping sauce that I absolutely loveee. You can opt for white or brown rice so I usually pay more for brown. It also comes with a delicious soup and three side dishes. Two of them are usually picked veggies and corn and the last one is usually a pork plate. I am surprised that one of the side dishes is meat but it is still very delicious! This is a tad more of a pricey lunch for about $ 15 or so with the drink upgrade but it’s totally worth it! It looks very fancy smancy inside and the food is divine.
**TIPS**
1) Upgrade your free drink for their boba! The boba balls are very delicious and the tea is just the right amount of sweetness.
2) Enjoy!

I had the «Green tea with fruits». It is literally green tea with a fruit cocktail in it. You will want to grab a fork to eat the «fruits» after drinking the tea. I’ve had better teas here.
You don’t have the typical HUGE variety of teas and add-​ons here, but what they do have is decent. I forget what I had last time, but it was better than the «Green tea with fruits».

At first glance, Café Ophelia looks like a really nice place to chat over drinks or eat a meal. Upon closer glance, I noticed that although the restaurant may once have been really pretty, it’s now quite run-​down — the seats are all stained and some are torn (and poorly taped up with clear tape). Who doesn’t want to sit on a lovely cluster of stains from different occasions?
I hoped that the food would redeem the restaurant’s appearance. No such luck. First of all, this restaurant isn’t really ‘Asian Fusion’. There are some really ‘Asian’ dishes like hot pot, bento boxes and Seafood Combo w/​Kimchi Fried Rice. Then there are dishes like Spaghetti Bolognese, New York steak, seafood chowder w/​puff pastry, and chicken nuggets. But I guess that’d be okay, if each individual dish tasted good, right?
(By the way, half the menu consists of drinks — there’s coffee, herbal grass jelly, milk tea, mango eggnog juice…)
I tried:
— Chili Chicken and Fish Filet Combo (~$ 11): this was on the special menu. And was extremely disappointing!
Came with a salad (four slices of canned peaches and canned pineapple on top of iceberg lettuce); soup (lukewarm Chinese-​style tomato soup); tea or coffee; and fruit.
The main dish was served on a huge plate, with various things all piled together in an unappetizing mess. None of the individual parts MATCHED; it was like a mix-​and-​match puzzle… There were two pieces of deep-​fried tofu (the deep-​fried skin was pretty gross, not crispy at all); two large pieces of chili chicken (it looked good until I realized that I was only looking at the top, which was basically fat/​skin. I turned it over, and it was pretty gross… Not sure what part of the chicken this was. Bits of tendon and a few shards of bone. Weird taste, not really ‘spicy’); two small fried fish (tasted okay, but they were sitting in some unknown clear, bland, goopy sauce); ¼ of an ear of corn; bland spaghetti with large flakes of dried bonito on top; boiled Chinese broccoli and carrots; and a slice of garlic bread.
The garlic bread and the slices of oranges were the best part of this dish.
— Braised Beef Brisket Combination ($ 10.80): comes w/​rice, three side dishes (this time, it was a fried chicken drumstick, stir-​fried cabbage, and green beans), and tea or coffee. It’s not listed on the menu, but we also got a bowl of soup — clear broth with a fish ball. The beef brisket tasted alright; there was too much tendon and not enough beef though, and the sauce was too sweet.
The service is quite lacking, even more than at your typical Chinese restaurant. The waitresses are never around, and we had to hunt down one to pay our bill.
Overall, this place is a huge disappointment! Because the chili chicken combo dish is so big, I was pretty full by the end of the meal, but I was by no means satisfied — I had to force myself to finish as much as possible because I hate wasting food. But I will not be returning. Definitely NOT worth it.

We came here last week and ordered two meals
(one daily special, one shubu shubu)
Afrer shubu shubu came and I told waiter need one more soy sauce.
they said ok but they didn’t give me.
So I went to take my soy sauce, Chopsticks & spoon (three times) by myself.
After we check out, I saw our receipt.
They charge soy sauce for $ 1.5.
I told them: I did’t know soy sauce need $ 1.5.
The reason I didn’t feel comfortable was because the shubu shubu was not $ 10,but $ 20 and they should tell me first.
Also your service was not good.
So I suggest everyone not to go there.

I haven’t been here for a few years and was surprised to see how high the prices had gone up today! We used to get bentos that came with a drink for about 6 or 7 dollars, but it’s at around $ 9 – 10 now.
My boyfriend ordered a beef noodle soup, and it came out to $ 14 pre-​tip! The beef noodle soup was pretty good but nothing special, and the side vegetables (broccoli, tofu, and pickled vegetables) were good too, but I was surprised as to how high the prices were for some standard food. Also not sure if it’s because we went during off hours (at 3pm), but we didn’t get very much service at all– only in the beginning to seat us and give us water and then again to serve our dish; to get the check we had to go up to the register to be seen. I used to come here for the bentos a lot, but I was disappointed that the prices have gone up by so much for the mediocre food.

The bento boxes to go are a great deal at less than $ 7 per box!

Everything here that I have tried tastes so good!!!
This place is great for sit down and takeout, but sit down does cost more. If you take out their bento it is pretty affordable and yummy. You just pick up and go. it’s all premade and kept heated. Pork and sausage bento (B) is the best one!

My family and I used to eat dinner here often when I was younger. It had been 6 or 7 years since I’ve eaten here. I remember getting their rack of lamb before, which was good – wasn’t anything spectacular though.
My first time back since then, I got one of their specials, which is offered most of the day. It was sliced beef steak, a piece of mahimahi, and sides (a roll, gailan, carrots, half a corn on the cob, and bean sprout sautéed with pasta). That was all on the main course plate. I also had a salad, a slice of watermelon, and a cup of soup as starters. The entire meal came with either a choice of coffee or tea, and the price was $ 12.
Needless to say… it was an enormous amount of food. I took half of it home. It was pretty good, but the steak was a little tough. There are other entrees that can range closer to $ 30, but I feel like the special is good enough.
The service wasn’t as friendly as I would have liked. It was somewhat curt and the staff did not look friendly nor happy. But considering the prices for the amount of food, it was worth it.

My review is for the taro milk tea at Café Ophelia – the best!!!
There was a comment in another review that there was no taro taste in the taro milk tea – must be comparing it to the artificial taro flavor powder that other places use, because there are real taro bits in this one! I haven’t found any other place in the Bay Area that uses real taro. Not too sweet, with satisfying pieces of taro that swirl around as you sip. Totally worth going here just for this drink!

(3.5 stars)
+ CREME BRULEE CHEESECAKE!
+ Friendly, accommodating cashier/​waitress
Came here w/​a girl friend on a Tuesday night around 9:45pm for some dessert & a hot drink only to find that the hours posted on Unilocal are wrong! Hours listed on Unilocal state that Café Ophelia is open until 11:30pm Mon-​Sun. Well, rats! They closed at 10pm. The cashier/​waitress was nice enough to let us go sit in the dining room to enjoy our cheesecake as we promised we would not stay long.
We shared a piece of the CREME BRULEE CHEESECAKE. Oh my! The cheesecake portion itself was amazing — I love the texture & crunch of real vanilla bean in my cheesecake. The crust left something to be desired as it was hard and dry from sitting in the refrigerator for too long. Similarly with the «crème brûlée» topping — to create a proper crème brûlée topping, the sugar is meant to be toasted/​torched immediately before serving. This cheesecake had clearly been sitting for quite some time so the topping was merely a caramel-​colored jelly-​ish film by the time our forks got to it.
I also had a hot TARO MILK TEA. It tasted good… but I couldn’t detect even a hint of taro flavor! What?
I’d be back to give Café Ophelia another chance, if anything for their lunch/​dinner menu.

We were here during an empty night so we were the only ones being served. There aren’t many dinner options, and everything seemed a little pricey (most things are around $ 9 – 10 or more).
Three of my friends got meals that included 5 or so small dishes on the side. Soups like udon and beef noodle was served in a medium sized bowl. I ordered the chili chicken and it came on a big plate with the chicken, some veggies (gai lan), corn on the cob, a biscuit, tofu, noodles, a small salad on the side, and soup on the side. My portion was probably the biggest, even if I only paid a dollar more. Chicken was not spicy at all (isn’t that what you would expect from ordering a chili chicken? Everything was very so-​so… we were all served a cup of tea at the end. The waitress came by very often to refill our waters and teas, which was nice.
It was a pretty meh experience and all my friends agreed the food was just okay.

There is one cardinal rule that I cannot stand when it goes broken. Well, I guess it’s a two part kind of thing. If I am spending money on food, I expect not only good quality food but good service. For me, some of the lack of quality in food can be alleviated through good customer service. And quite frankly, it doesn’t take much: being courteous with «Thank you» and «Sorry’s» and maybe even a smile. Really pretty simple.
That being said, I have been getting Mango Pana Cotta religiously at this place because it’s my sister’s favorite. The service hasn’t been great, but today was just. really frustrating. I was getting Pana Cotta to go and was kind of in a rush. I paid and then had to wait literally 10+ minutes. The cashier had to finish drinks of another customer, which was fine and made sense. Then she just ran around seating multiple parties and other tasks. I get it, people are busy. I can be patient. What pissed me off is that when she finally remembered us, she went to get the pana cotta from the freezer (I know this because she put on a jacket and also bc my pana cotta was frozen –_​-​). She threw a fork, napkin, and pana cotta haphazardly into the bag. I tried to be friendly and tried to smile and said «thank you!» and she just stared at me, staring at me coldly and just. idks. stared at me… it was unnerving.
This put me in a really bad mood especially since I get a pana cotta every time I go to Ipho. This is a tradition that I will be breaking now. My sister and I ate the pana cotta frozen because we have a serious case of sweet tooth. It was depressing. Frozen pana cotta has a weird texture.
TIP: a little birdie told me that they get their dessert delivered from Moos Cakes. I’m going to take my sweet tooth there in hopes they don’t give me weird attitude and frozen desserts.

The service here is awful. Usually that’s what completes a Chinese restaurant but at least in any Chinese restaurant, you would still have utensils, hot tea, and timely responses to your requests. Our waitress didn’t help with any of that to the point we had to have another waitress serve us instead.
The food here is expensive and if you’re a big eater, the amount you spend here is going to pile up fast. My parents and I ordered 2 combinations, the Eel Kabayaki being $ 12.80 and Braised Pork Knuckle being $ 11.80. Each combination comes with 3 side dishes. They don’t tell you what they are but it’s tomato with scrambled eggs, 2 generous pieces of fish fillet, and string beans. It comes with rice and tasteless soup.
My parents ordered the seafood chowder with puff pastry ($ 6.80) and it was tasteless.
To get hot tea and coffee here is impossible. They served it to us at the very end but only when we asked for it about 4 – 5 times. Throughout our experience here, this awful waitress kept telling us to be patient and she never came back. The presentation of the food and the restaurant were really cute though. This is a perfect date place.

Average food for the price
the pork chop set was below average, it came with 3 little side dishes and a soup. I also had some of the spicy beef, which taste pretty good
They had quite a few restriction on the drink, can’t get this, can’t get that, or extra $ 1 here and there… It wasn’t too nice of experience…
after tax and tips, it was like $ 13 – 14 per person. Kind of expensive comparing to other lunch special

I came here for lunch with my parents, and this place was packed with customers. We had to wait a few minutes before we got seated. When I looked at the menu, I was surprised that most of the dishes cost at least 10 bucks.
I felt like the place is a bit understaffed, since we didn’t really get service after we sat down. We were looking at the menu for at least 10 minutes before the waitress stopped by. I noticed she helped out other customers who arrived later, too.
My family decided to order the following dishes:
1. Miso Yaki Seabass ($ 15.8) — Yes, this dish cost 16 bucks! The seabass was good, but the portion was super tiny.
2. Singaporean Pork Ribs ($ 10.8) — I think the name is a bit misleading. I was expecting to get some dry pork ribs. This dish was served in a cup of soup. The pork ribs was super fatty, so I was unable to eat it. The pork had no flavor, too. I would not recommend this dish.
3. Braised Pork Knuckle ($ 11.8) — The portion size was ok, but this is another super fatty dish. There was barely any pork in the dish. The small pieces of pork was tender though.
All the dishes came with 3 side dishes.
1. bean sprouts — i didn’t try this
2. tofu with bamboo shoots — this was oily and greasy. The tofu was good.
3. braised pork ribs — the pork was really flavorful, but it was very fatty
Overall, Café Ophelia has ok and overpriced Chinese food. I was surprised at how oily and fatty the dishes were. The service was ok, too. I probably wouldn’t come back here.

I don’t think I can trust Jim D. on picking Fremont restaurants anymore. I would think working around the area for like 6 months now you would know what is good and what is not! Jim D. Unilocal FAIL!
This restaurant belongs in an asian plaza. it is in a convenient location for all the businesses around. When I walked in, the place was nicely decorated. I will not deny it. I was actually impressed by how the place looks. It had a nice theme to it with the comfortable chairs that felt like mini couches. The lights are a bit too dimmed especially for a lunchtime deal. The venue itself is spacious with plenty of tables.
When I saw the menu, I was a bit disappointed at the lack of selection. Some came with combos but some came in individual dishes. I got the seabass combo. It came with 3 side dishes and a bowl of rice. The seabass was edible but it wasn’t that great. The cold side dishes was average. Nothing impressive at all. Jim D. ordered the chicken breast one which resembled to chicken katsu. Korean/​Japanese places make chicken katsu ten times better than this place!!! How can you cook katsu wrong!!! I ended up taking the rest to go but ended up forgetting about it in my fridge.
Service was lacking the attention. I felt like I had to chase them around in order to get what i want.
blehhh. i just don’t have anything else to say other than blehhhhh

This place has been around the same area for almost 6.5 years now (probably longer). I came here my junior year of high school for dinner before a school dance. On my most recent visit, I ordered the teriyaki chicken combo meal which was the same thing I ordered back then. It tasted pretty much the same after all these years (not in a good way) and the milk tea with pearls was the same, too.
The combo meals here ranged from $ 10.80 to $ 15.80 and included 3 side dishes and soup. The soup I got was fish soup and there were fish scales with every bite. It seemed like they just threw in a chunk of fish in the soup without even taking off the scales or something.
Stuff like that made wonder if that’s how the Café Ophelia in Milpitas closed down or if it was something entirely different.