Cafe Asia

The food quality has deteriorated over the past year or so since they have evolved from self serve to waiters. My meal yesterday came close to inedible although I was hungry and ate it all. Chicken curry– blah sauce, more like gravy, overcooked dry chicken chunks and very few vegetables. My friends” vegetable sukiyakis also received low marks. Mostly efficient table service and pricey for what you get. The menu choice are appealing but they don’t deliver the goods.

We came here to get take out for lunch. There was a long ass line to get in but my friend hopped to the front and asked where we can get take out. Turns out the long ass line is for dine in. For take out, go to the back and order from the cashier. Unfortunately the cashier is located in the kitchen so it’s really tight space in that area with people waiting for their take out and the writers carrying their food to the tables. Ordering was painless though.
We got the turkey and Swiss sandwich with a side salad. Yeah we didn’t order the faux Asian food because it was expensive. While we were waiting we saw fried gyoza. 4 for $ 7 and a sad chow mein in a bowl that’s only filled half way. No meat either. That cost an arm and a leg.
The hot dog and fries ($ 7+) were huge. Probably the best deal in the regular menu. Our sandwiches was the daily special so it’s not available every day.
Sandwich was good. Turkey was juicy and flavorful. The bread was also yummy. Loved the dressing on the salad too.
You can enter the museum for free if you want to order food at their café. Very good but expensive food without the street riff raff.

Good food (braised pork rice bowl) for a museum café, though a bit pricey.

Consistently very good food, but a bit pricey. The space is nice and the patio, when the weather is right, is delightful. I come here about once a month. The menu changes with the exhibits, or at least it used to. They have just instituted table service, I am not sure what I think about that yet.

Overpriced for very sub-​par stuff. Served awkwardly, in a cheap-​looking, dated tray and pot. I was here years ago, and it was a decent experience. It’s gone way downhill. The macaroon must have been days old. It was so hard it felt like it was breaking my teeth. I got through about ¹⁄₃ of it before I gave up. The green tea was tasteless and terribly bland. A Bigelow teabag tastes better than that. When I poured the tea from the mini pot, the tea spilled out from the lid, onto the tray. It was $ 6 for tasteless tea and a rock-​hard macaroon. Unacceptable experience.

I was in a program in the library and half my class would come here for lunch. You just tell the front desk of the museum that you’re eating and you get a special sticker (with chopsticks. How fitting). The line would go the length of the room (around 1:15pm on a Saturday), but we would still be able to get through the line and get our food in 10 minutes or so. The quality is pretty good, but it was nowhere near being worth their high prices!
There are seats in the main cafeteria, in a side room inside, and outside on the patio. For a beautiful, sunny Saturday, there was no one sitting outside! We were lucky in catching lunch in a patch of good weather as the rest of the day was pretty cloudy, windy, and chilly.
The service is professional and efficient. The food prep is quick, and they bus your tables.
* Fishermans’ Noodles (stir fry udon noodles, manila clams, squid, prawns, cabbage, basil, shiitake mushrooms, tamari, sake. $ 14) — 4 stars
pic:
This was just what I needed. The udon noodles were soft, and the light broth, veggies, and seafood made this feel like a healthy option. The seafood wasn’t super fresh but it sufficed.
Main lunch menu:
Daily menu:

In terms of museum cafes, this is one of the better ones by far. There are definitely some other, probably cheaper and tastier choices nearby since you’re right next to Little Saigon, but if you’re a weary museum-​goer, this is really not a bad place to be. Plus, they have loose leaf teas! Yes! Totally worth a stop if it’s relatively empty — there’s nothing like exploring the museum and grabbing a pot of tea and a snack to recall the art and history you’ve just experienced.
The menu itself is quite nice. There are also sandwiches and stuff in the cold section (important: there’s Thai iced tea in the cold section which is awesome). I got a yakiniku banh mi, which was quite excellent and came with MEGACRUNCH fries (aptly and awesomely named). I decided to tell myself to forget that Little Saigon was RIGHT THERE and I probably could have gotten something equally good for less than half the price, but whatever. The cafeteria-​style place is nice and pretty calming. I went a little after the museum opened, so it wasn’t crowded at all.
The boyfriend got a dim sum plate. It was okay — the best part of that plate was the shumai, mainly because it didn’t have an overly greasy texture to it. There was some odd vegetarian dumpling that we both weren’t fond of, and we’re not sure what flavor made us make faces. What kind of faces, you ask? Ever give a picky kid something new? Imagine that crinkly, terrified, wtf facial expression, and that’s pretty much what we looked like after eating the vegetarian potstickers.
Another plus is that they had daifuku mochi (totally available in Japantown, of course, and that was another thought I had to forcefully push away) and my favorite Japanese sweet maple bread.
All in all, it was expensive but not overwhelmingly so for a museum café. The bottom line is, I wouldn’t mind staying in the museum to eat so I can continue perusing immediately afterward, and that’s also mainly due to the fact that I love the Asian Art Museum to the point where strangers think I’m a docent. I may try some of the other dishes just to make sure… and of course, a pot of tea for two (which is actually all just for me).

I had a pretty decent bowl of butternut squash soup. The cafeteria style process of ordering is a little unorganized and slow but I think this place has a nice variety of choices when you need a break.
Today was free museum day and I also noticed they have a yoga class here that I will go to next time.

This is a good place to stop for tea or a cold drink. But the oi kaji salad I had today was awful. It was overwhelmingly bitter and salty. It also contained raw sweet potatoes, which are indigestible. For 11 dollars I was left with a singed palate and a stomach ache.

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This is your run of the mill café in an establishment where you wouldn’t expect the food to be that great anyway… an art museum. The prices were high and the food was meh. I ordered the teriyaki chicken, which was more like bland chicken with a touch of teriyaki flavor. The sliders my husband got were totally devoid of flavor. He had to whip out the sriracha. The sweet potato fries were the highlight out of the hot foods.
One bright light is that they offer some Asian desserts such as mochi and Japanese sweet buns. Those are usually pretty good, but they were out of coconut mIocha so I was bummed about that.
It’s cafeteria style, and the service was good.

As I stated in my review of the Asian Art Museum, this café is outstanding! Both my boyfriend and I got the chicken rice bowls and they were fantastic! If you’re nearby and just want to eat here and not take in the museum, they do allow that. I highly recommend this café!

After the gym, I was very hungry! I couldn’t resist the guava lemonade — yummy and thirst-​quenching. I ordered the Tokyo Ramen for my lunch entrée — noodles tasted a bit like packaged noodles but the broth was decent, plus they had pieces of pork, mushrooms, green onions and an egg. Pretty good. I was so hungry, I also got an order of sweet potato fries — I can’t resist those either, but all of this probably put me over the top, too much food… food coma. But it held me over while I stood in line for almost an hour to see the Cyrus Cynlinder. Overall, the café was a-​ok!

The lure of China’s Terracotta Warriors brought Jamie W. and me back to the Asian Art Museum for the first time in at least five years, and it was well worth the special $ 20 admission. It also gave us an opportunity to try the in-​house cafeteria, which certainly has the veneer of something more stylish than your typical museum café. Of course, with Charles Phan raising the stakes with operations like the Moss Room at the California Academy of Sciences, perhaps I was expecting more than the bland pan-​Asian cuisine to be found here.
The menu appears to cater to the coddled stomachs of insulated art patrons unwilling to venture a couple of blocks north to the culinary wilds of Little Saigon. It was jam-​packed the day we were there thanks to those popular stone soldiers. The line for the café almost reached out to the front door next to the escalator. While Jamie waited patiently to get our food, I decided to stake a table in the middle next to a foreign mother and son who were eating their own sandwiches and drinking their own juice boxes. I say good for them. The admission was expensive enough without the additional burden of a restaurant-​priced cafeteria. Jamie came back with a tray full of food.
He went with the $ 6.50 bowl of the aptly named «Warrior» Soup which consisted of a salty broth with tatsoi (Chinese mustard greens), mushrooms and carrots — all of that chopped to submission — and perhaps two wonton dumplings — one pork, the other shrimp (see photo). Bland. Then he decided to be healthy and ordered the $ 9.95 Café Asia Chicken Salad, which was about as Asian as having tea at the Mark Hopkins. It consisted of grilled chicken breast sliced like it was ready to make its debut on a business class flight alongside bean sprouts, Mandarin orange wedges, and crispy wonton strips. It all rested on top of a mix of California-​style organic greens and mixed with a sesame-​ginger vinaigrette (see photo).
Again there was nothing remotely unique about the execution. Just something to please the bluehairs. As for me, I couldn’t pass up an opportunity for ramen, so I had the $ 13 Ramen Noodle Soup. David Chang has nothing to worry about here as the slices of pork chashu were barely there as they swam in a lukewarm broth that featured woodear mushrooms, menma (fermented bamboo shoots), and daikon sprouts (see photo). Despite the intrigue of some of the ingredients, the noodles themselves were a bit on the soggy side, marginal disappointment given chef Melinda Quirino’s Japanese food background at Hotel Nikko. Alas, I assume the terracotta soldiers had to survive on rice on a shingle.
FOOD — 3 stars… the pan-​Asian blandness of the dishes disappointed me
AMBIANCE — 3.5 stars… a nice set-​up for a museum café, especially the outdoor patio seating well insulated from the vagrants below
SERVICE — 3.5 stars… they keep the line moving
TOTAL — 3 stars… now would the terracotta soldiers would eat this food?

Not bad Asian food. It’s a good place to go when the weather is nice since the café has an outdoor seating area (yes, even if the view is the double-​decker tour buses and homeless people).
I’d come back here again if I had some money to spare.

Quick tip: You can just drop into the Café for lunch without having to pay museum admission!
I recently learned of the Asian Art Museum’s Café Asia and that it was pretty good, so I took my mom out to lunch here on a Wednesday. The prices are somewhat steep for lunch ($ 10-​$ 15) compared to all the Asian restaurants up the street in Little Saigon; however Café Asia definitely caters to a different crowd and uses a variety of fresh ingredients. Fortunately, Scout Mob was having a 50% off deal when I came for lunch, so my visit was a great value. (Check it out while it lasts!)
We shared the Oolong tea smoked salmon-​soba salad (~$ 13) and the Gochujang pork shoulder (~$ 11): I would definitely skip the salmon salad. The salmon was on the dry-​side, and although the salad was not bad, it is not worth $ 13.
You need to get the Gochujang pork shoulder: the marinade is sweet and delicious. There was a generous serving of pork, which was tender and served atop a fluffy bowl of rice. Delish!
I also got a Thai-​iced tea (competitively priced at $ 2.50), and it was perfect since it was not overly sweet like Thai-​iced tea tends to be.
There is also alfresco dining, however it was closed to a private event during my visit.
Overall, I would recommend checking out Café Asia for fusion-​Asian cuisine done right! I would definately come back to try some of the other hot dishes.

Overrated and over priced «Asian» food.
Service wasn’t the greatest. Food was not hot and not enough taste. Left disappointed.

I have never been to Café Asia during my many visits to the Asian Art Museum. Finally came here with a friend who has eaten here before. Out of all the many in-​museum cafes and restaurants in the area, she rates this one as the best.
We were visiting the Asian Art Museum on the next to the last day of «Maharaja,» I was feeling a little dizzy when we were inside Gallery 3. My friend suggested it was time for lunch and we go get a meal at Café Asia. She told me about a fabulous noodle dish she had which had mighty large portions we could share.
We decided when we looked at the menu, we could each get our own individual dish. The noodle dish was no longer there. There was a dim sum special with one’s own choice of tea. It was one pork bow, three shrimp haw gow, and two steamed potstickers. My friend had a small order of vegetarian curry over rice which she let me sample. Both dishes were delicious. After a satisfying lunch, we resumed our visit to «Maharaja» in Gallery 3 and visited the third floor to see the Asian Art Museum’s collection of art from India, some of the art effects are downstairs as part of the «Maharaja» exhibit closing on April 8.
When I got home, I researched on Unilocal and the Asian Art Museum’s website about Café Asia. The menu changes at Café Asia and the selections are inspired by the current exhibit being promoted i.e. «Maharaja: The Splendor of India’s Courts.» Much of the menu was inspired by this exhibit.
Café Asia is going to change its menu again really soon with the new exhibit «Phantoms of Asia.» I am planning to come back to the Asian Art Museum for this exhibit and have a quick meal at Café Asia to see what is on the menu inspired by this exhibit. If it is just as good as the menu items inspired by «Shanghai» and «Maharaja,» I will be one happy Chiara! Maybe they will bring back the noodle dish for this upcoming exhibition. .. just a thought.

Want a big bowl of hot, spicy Korean tofu stew? Go somewhere else, preferably SoCal. Want delicate, well-​prepared, yuppy Asian food? Come here!
I am not afraid to admit that I love this place. It’s a cute and casual cafeteria with a zen, Asian-​inspired vibe. Perfect for grabbing a bite after exploring the museum or just when you’re in the Civic Center neighborhood. (If you’re not visiting the museum, just get a sticker at the front desk)
I had the Korean pork shoulder and tofu stew. My friend had the chicken salad. Both were really tasty. They were fresh and well-​seasoned. The portions were not huge but they were fine for a medium-​sized lunch. I am looking forward to trying their other offerings, like the pumpkin soup and noodles.
In the spirit of being Asian, a money-​saving tip from me, free of charge:
Come on the first Sunday of the month for free admission to the museum, and use the 50% off Scoutmob coupon on your mobile phone Scoutmob app!

Seeing Rinky’s review reminded me I hadn’t written one yet. This was my first time at the Asian Art Museum. Alan and I had planned to visit months ago and didn’t because it was a free day or something. I had heard from Nina that the café here was the best of the museum cafés, so I was set to like it.
It was a gorgeous, sunny day, shirtsleeve weather. Dorothy, Rinky and I took BART over together, chattering away like magpies, sometimes inaudibly because of the screech of the wheels of the cars underground. Aside from the noise, it was a great start to a lovely afternoon. We walked from the Civic Center station a few blocks over to the museum.
The dining room is spacious and attractive. The museum itself is substantial while being bright and inviting. I look forward to exploring it on another day. Today was for visiting and eating. I hadn’t met Leah before and found her charming and interesting. The conversation, as you might imagine, was lively and far ranging. Rinky has told you what we ate, so I won’t repeat that, other than to say my dish was very tasty, a goodly portion of crab w/​sliced shiitakes, bell peppers, rice (or was it yam thread?) noodles w/​a soy dressing. There was a bit of heat in the dressing but overall it blended well w/​the other ingredients so the heat wasn’t pervasive. The tea selection was extensive and varied. I got a pot of Golden Monkey and was well pleased. I look forward to a return visit.