Cousin Cafe

Not even acknowledgement to say we’ll be with you. It definitely is popular but they are not customer oriented. I think their attitude is ‘our food is good come or leave whatever.”
Not coming back.

What’s not to love about this place? Friendly Asian ladies and a late night happy hour menu with tasty staple dishes!
Service — super nice ladies, but because I speak Canto? Usually at Hk cafes, like Venus and some other one in Fremont, they are run by guys my age that aren’t typically friendly in my experiences. The ladies took care of my and my bf quite well and even recommended substitutions because we ordered too much food haha.
Food —
Condensed milk toast — who doesn’t love this? The bread was so fluffy but crisp on the edges and surface. Just enough condensed milk on top to give it that sweetness without it making the bread soggy.
Chow fun beef tendon noodle. Or something of the sort. Pure deliciousness! Add some chili paste from the table and the tastiness has exceeded over 9000 in my book. No picture because it was that good.
Mini pork chop over rice — cheesiness, maybe fried rice and tender pork chop. Smaller than the big one, hence the mini, but great size to be able to try everything without not ordering it lol.
Garlic chicken wings — crispy crispy wings! Dip it in the sweet chili sauce and boom.
It definitely gets busy here. They don’t take Discover and don’t have pictures of every item, but explore the menu! :)

Average Hong Kong style café. Food is mediocre and it’s extremely busy during peak lunch hours.
If you’re not in a rush, I would suggest coming after peak hours (1:30?) so the wait time is shorter. I came at 11:50 AM on a weekday and was seated promptly. Customers poured it once the clock struck noon. I noticed that other customers were trying to pay their bill and the waiter told them «I told you to pay before noon, now with so many people here I need to take their order first so the kitchen can get started!» Is this a way to speak to customers? Perhaps in this form of restaurant…
Just like previous reviews have noted, their lemon tea has way too much ice. There’s no space to crush your contents. I suppose Asian people just like the look of having a lot in their cup… and not HOW you drink it.

Decent quality of food. Great portion. Menu has a great variety of food items. Plus that it opens till pretty late!

Been here cover times. Some foods DELICIOUS «fries rices and Thai spicy seafood noodles and wonton with hen

Hong Kong style café with a clever name that serves pretty decent food.
Cousin Café’s name is really clever. It is of no relation to its real deal namesake in Hong Kong (can you say trademark infringement?). Cousin Café in Hong Kong was owned by movie director Alfred Cheung. At one point, he owned close to a dozen cafes that spread across Hong Kong and Guangzhou. The word «Cousin», in Hong Kong lingo, refers to a young man or woman from mainland China in a somewhat derogatory way because of the cultural friction between the former British colony and its current Communist overlord.
Enough of the history lesson. I met a couple friends at Cousin Café for lunch a few Mondays ago. It was about 12:30pm when we got there and the place was only half full. We were seated quickly by one of the servers at a table close to the entrance. Seating was a bit cramped since they managed to put quite a few tables into the tiny restaurant. The environment appeared clean. Walls were plastered with pictures of different dishes.
Our server gave us a stack of menus. There was one for lunch specials, one for breakfast (not sure why they gave us that one since it was lunch time), a regular menu, and a couple others. After we sorted through all the reading materials, we ordered the following:
— Baked Pork Chop Fried Rice (with fried egg on top) + Iced Hong Kong Milk Tea ($ 8.50 + $ 1)
— Baked Pork Chop Rice in Twin Sauces (cream and tomato) + Iced Lemon Tea ($ 8.50 + $ 1)
— Spareribs in Black Bean Sauce Rice Bucket (~$ 9, served with a bowl of lettuce in beef brisket sauce)
It took about a little more than 10 minutes for our food to arrive. My baked pork chop fried rice was quite good. Two pretty thick pieces of pan fried pork loin laid on top of the fried rice and smothered in a robust tomato sauce. The pork loin pieces remained moist despite being pan fried. The fried egg added a different dimension to the dish. The runny yolk provided a level of creaminess to the dish when mixed with the tomato sauce. The milk tea was very good. It was creamy and had a strong tea taste. I was pleased with the quality of my food.
I heard no complaints from the others about their food.
Our server was quite friendly. We asked for a couple extra things and she took care of them promptly. There is one thing I have to mention. For a small café, some of their a la carte dishes are quite expensive (~$ 15 to $ 18 per dish). My recommendation is stick with their Hong Kong style café food and avoid ordering a la carte dishes. I’m just not sure how good they are.

I usually get the fish soup and old country man fried rice which are the best dishes in here. Also the fish soup come with a spicy sauce (my fav, they also sell it). But I recently went here and found out the soup become soooo tasteless! Sad…:((this late night eats place is off my list.

This is probably the most expensive ($ 16) and worst seafood pan fried noodles ive ever had! The broth/​gravy is super bland and it had like 2 shrimps! Will never order this here again! For that much money, i expected a lot more…

I’ve been here a lot as a kid, and just recently (ie today) came back. Apparently my parents still come here a lot, but it’s fallen off of my radar. Maybe no longer though!
I got the Portuguese baked chicken rice (they call it Lisbon sauce here, though it’s called Portuguese everywhere else. Lisbon is the capital of Portugal though, so I guess there’s that.), and it was pretty good. Lots of rice and chicken and sauce, plus scattered taro?, carrots, and broccoli. Lots of food, big dish. $ 8.95 for it. My mom ordered fish soup noodles or something, and it was really good. They serve this delicious spicy pepper on the side, and it complements the noodle soup really well. The noodles have fish (obviously), fish cake, mushrooms. Really delicious! We got a side order of fried pork, which is great too. Crispy outside, chewy inside, not dry. We also got two cups of Hong Kong style hot milk tea, buy one get one free after 3PM! Yay. It’s pretty sweet at the bottom, but among the 3 of us, it was enough! Yum.
Food quality is quite good, but it’s a bit pricy. Might come back with my parents, but I probably won’t go out of my way to come here. Food deserves 3.5 stars, ambiance and service bump it up to 4 stars.

Pretty mediocre and it’s almost like they purposely made decisions to be that way.
Someone recommended this place for late night eats so our group filed into Cousin Café and found it empty with just another solo diner. Two small tables filled up while we were there.
After 3 PM, drinks are buy one, get one free. They won’t actively tell you this if you missed the memo. We ordered drinks and didn’t know until newly seated customers next to us brought it up during their order. We asked about it and requested our second free drinks to go. Turns out there is a 25 cent surcharge for to-​go drinks so instead of forking over quarters, the guys in our group just stayed put and got super hydrated in the restaurant. The only other set of newly seated customers was a couple who ordered one drink between them. The server also didn’t tell them that they could get a second one free. Not so great service.
They had two TVs on opposite walls on. The one behind us was showing some sort of Chinese soap opera and the one facing us was showing a Spanish channel. No volume on. The two women staffing the café were so loud and continuous in their gossip that they were the persistent, high volume background noise the entire meal. Get your employees to pipe down or turn on your TV volume, even if you have to make the channels match.
They refused to let my friend swap ham for spam in one of the dishes. They are both cheap, overly processed meats that rhyme, plus you probably use generic tins of luncheon meat instead of brand name Spam to cut costs. Let the poor guy have his small portion of generic spam.
A woman emerged from the kitchen to eat with the staff. We saw her head back into the kitchen, put her bowl down, and then go to a work counter. We wondered wasn’t there suppose to be hand washing in-​between those last two steps?
I think we’d pursue In-​n-​Out for late night eats over this place any time.

I’ve been wanting to try the won tons here for a while and well I had the opportunity today to order them! I drove into the little plaza on the side of NewPark Mall right next to Newark Memorial High School… ah the memories of Knights Video Games and Service Merchandise… oh I digress. I parked closer to King of Dumplings as I was going to order other food besides the won ton noodle soup from Cousin Café. There were still a fair amount of people still having lunch and I strolled right towards the cashier. I think she spoke to me in some chinese dialect and I sheepishly had to answer back in English. I ordered my food to go and for $ 8.71 I paid in cash as they don’t take anything but cash. They told me 10 minutes and I just hung around the seating in the front. It didn’t take all of 10 minutes so swift it was.
I took the food home and plated it. It had a fair amount of won tons around 7 i think with spinach and egg noodles. The soup base was not super flavorful but better than the napa cabbage won ton soup we had the day prior. The egg noodles were cooked perfectly and had a nice bite to them. Now let’s get to the piece de resistance. The wonton. The wontons were definitely good. no small fake shrimp in them or miniscule/​microscopic amounts. Full on shrimps cut at most in half which made the won tons very flavorful.
So overall I wish I could just get the won tons by themselves without the soup or the noodles, but c’est la vie. If I’m ever back in the area. I might try other menu items out but I won’t go out of my way to come back.

I like their cream pastas (because it’s for people that can’t cook, like me) and their fish porridge. It’s Cantonese style and I hella dig it. You can grab it for $ 5 a bowl during happy hour.
Recently I ordered the mixed fruit and grass jelly drink (because BOGO free). The mixed fruit consists of 7UP and cocktail fruits, grass jelly is maybe ¹⁄₃ cup grass jelly and the rest some kind of condensed milk mixture. I wasn’t too crazy about it. Do not recommend…
I also had shrimp pineapple fried rice. I thought it needed oil and salt, which I guess is why they have salt shakers on the table…
I come here for the porridge and the fact that they’re open late, not so much for the actual Chinese entrees because they’re way expensive and I restrain myself from ordering them as much as I can.

The lunch special is a scam.
I order the peanut milk toast (A) and the garlic chicken wings, which cost $ 10.95 according to the special.
But if you order as a single item, the wings cost $ 6.95 + toast $ 3.50 = total of 10.45.
Plus the portion of the special is smaller (wings: 7 pieces in single order vs 5 pieces in the lunch special; same thing for toast).
So make sure you know what you will get before you order. You may get scammed here and there.

Hong Kong style café — casual, fast, and tasty — either snack time or tea time preferably for me. During those times they usually include a free drink, I always opt for the lemon iced tea, deliciously refreshing.
Garlic chicken wings are bomb. Also the shrimp egg noodle and be sure to get the eggs wet. It becomes this messy slimy egg shrimp chow fun, it’s freakn delicious! I also recommend, the brisket curry and the best thing there — THE pork cutlet! Two crispy, fatty, juicy pork cutlets comes with veggies and either rice or spaghetti. It’s def. an acquired taste (which I love) but they also have the infamous HK fusion dish of baked seafood rice or tomato rice with pork.

I usually always order to-​go from Cousin Café but I finally had the chance to dine in here. The menu has a wide variety of options but I always stick to ordering the same thing. The food here is Hong Kong style and it never disappoints!
I’ve only tried two things from here — the baked pasta with ham & cream sauce and the fried garlic chicken wings.
1. Baked pasta with ham and cream sauce — I’m a sucker for any baked dish with cream sauce. The sauce here is flavorful, a little on the saltier side, but nothing too overwhelming. On the menu, this dish comes with spaghetti but I always ask them to change it to macaroni instead because I personally think it tastes much better that way. Beware there isn’t much that’s included in the baked pasta — it comes with sliced ham pieces, onions, mushrooms, and melted cheese on top. I’ve ordered it many times and the flavor is always consistent and the portions are decently large too!
2. Garlic chicken wings — I tried these for the first time when I dined in and I’m so glad I listened to my fellow Unilocalers and ordered it. The wings came out piping hot, perfectly fried and crispy, and seasoned just right. It comes with a small side of sweet sauce but honestly, I don’t think you need it because it takes away from the actual flavor of the wings. My mom loved it so much she even ordered a second plate of them: P
Overall, the food is good — nothing amazing but definitely doesn’t disappoint.
The service here is mediocre. They don’t really come check up on you for water/​tea refills; you have to call them over yourself.

This place transports you back to Hongkong. It’s super busy, the food is really legit, and service is pretty close to none. But that’s how they do in Asia ;).
There are tons of option on the menu ranging from chinese doughnuts which are fried and tastes wonderful with sweet soy milk to classic porridge with thousand year old eggs and meat. Besides your classic breakfast options, there are also a lot of lunch options that I want to try next time. Today I came early around 9am for breakfast. Not being familiar with the portion size, I went with a packaged meal of porridge with fried rice cake. Two people could have easily shared this dish and be full. The porridge was so delicious, perfectly soft and flavored just right. It was so interesting to eat the fried rice cake with a mix of hoisin sauce and peanut butter. That was a first for me but I actually really enjoyed the combo. I also tried the Hongkong milk tea which is really different from your typical chinese/​taiwanese milk tea. This one is a more bitter version of a thai tea. i can see how it’s an acquired taste as I didn’t like it that much. My friend got the XO soup which had elbow macaronis, spinach, and meat in a chicken Xo stock. Surprisingly, it was really good! Definitely a lot of firsts for me that morning and I did enjoy everything. Clearly this place is popular among the old people because a large group of them were here enjoying breakfast together which was really cute. I can see my future self coming here with friends on a weekly basis to get breakfast if I lived in the area =)

* HONG KONG CAFE *
A friend recommended this restaurant to me when she found out that I was visiting the East Bay area. I guess this is a good spot to get your Hong Kong Café fix if you are living in this area. Cousin Café is a small shop with limited seating. It is more like a «eat and go» place, and definitely not a place you can «chill and relax» at.
Visit the restaurant around 4:30pm on a weekend and it was packed with people. It’s a good thing that their turnover is pretty fast. Ordered the following for my afternoon tea: Garlic Deep Fried Chicken Wings and Hong Kong Milk Tea. (Note: They do have Buy One Get One Free Drinks Special after 3:00pm). Food was cooked perfectly and was served sizzling hot, and milk tea was delicious. However, price is ridiculously high. For the 2 items I ordered, my tab was $ 10 (after tax and tips).
Overall…
Food: Awesome
Drinks: Awesome
Service: Meh
Price: Ouch

Prices have been slowly rising over time.
$ 14 now $ 16 for Fukien Fried Rice (Outrageous!)
Pros:
–Good tastes
–Large assortment of menu items
Cons:
–Small dining area
–Price hike up
Tips:
–Helpful if you know Canto
–Late night prices are cheaper

Came here for the first time (after seeing this place whenever I am nearby so many times) for lunch. It was around 11:30am — 12:00pm and there was no wait. We were quickly seated and were given the menu right away. The staff was quick in coming and ask if we were ready to order, which would be nice during peak hours.
We ended up just getting a baked pork chop over rice (typical dish in most HK cafes/​restaurants) and a spicy salt and pepper chicken wings for the two of us. I can tell you that these two dishes definitely filled us up! The baked pork chop over rice was just average. I’ve definitely had better as well as in a bigger portion (Venus’s). The pork chop was just a little bit too salty for me. The sauce was only okay, but a little too thin. On the other hand, the chicken wings were pretty good! I love chicken wings and their chicken wings are pretty delicious. It was fried chicken wings with some onions, peppers, and jalapenos. I thought the chicken wings itself weren’t spicy, but it definitely was when you combined it with the spices (i.e. jalapenos). But the chicken wings themselves were very juicy despite having to be fried. It was tender and juicy, yum!
Service was okay. One of the waitress came to grab two pairs of chopsticks off our table to give it to another table, which I found odd and funny. You’re not really supposed to do that while we were eating. But, I mean, that’s fine. The waitress was laughing hard after, too, so that was funny.
I had a pretty good experience here except that it took forever to get their attention so we could get the check. The price is very decent as well, which is good. I would come back again, for the chicken wings but not so much the baked pork chop over rice.

Thank goodness I have a Chinese boyfriend to show me all these good places. I don’t know why people are giving this place such low ratings. I personally like this place. Sure, service is nowhere but the food is great!
My boyfriend, his mom, and I arrived here during lunch time on a Sunday. It was pretty packed in there and our server did take a while to take our order, but we were sitting literally in front of the cash register, so it wasn’t a problem for us to flag them down.
Food took a little long to come out but the place was crackin’, so I understand. My food came out first which was a seafood pan fried noodle. Then it was my boyfriend’s Hainan chicken, then lastly was my boyfriend’s mom’s soup. All were very good, I could tell because we all finished our food so fast! The portions were decent too.
I love all these yummy HK cafes, plus this place is in a plaza filled with pearl drinks/​boba for dessert!