Restaurant Week - Asia de Cuba

Since Adam (the bf) and I had such a nice time at Lure Fishbar for Restaurant Week, we wanted to get one more meal in before it was over.

Yesterday, we decided to enjoy a nice lunch at Asia de Cuba. They had very good reviews on Yelp and an interesting menu.

The place was pretty, but strange at the same time. Their decor consisted of white curtains along the walls, so it felt pretty stale to me. We were seated upstairs overlooking the downstairs, which centered around a giant light box with a waterfall-type image. It was pretty cheesy if you ask me, but I wasn't there for the decor, I was there to eat!

<--- Adam being silly while we wait for our food. :)

The service was rushed and uninviting, but it was lunch and fairly busy. A party of 2 consisted of 2 appetizers, 1 shared entree and 1 shared dessert. We were a little worried about the portion size, but in the end left full.

To start, the brought out the Beef Dumplings Two Ways, which were really tasty! The dish had three crispy beef dumplings that reminded me of fried wontons and steamed beef dumplings with ponzu sauce. There was something on the menu about coconut rice, but there was no rice to be found on our plate. Anyhoo, they were large, filled with beef and seasoned well. Definitely top-notch dumplings, but was terrified to discover they charge over $20 for this on the regular menu. They were by no means worth $20, even $1 per dumpling seems like a rip-off to me.

Next came the Lemongrass Skewered Chicken, which was my favorite dish at Asia de Cuba. I do believe that each skewer was a boneless, skinless chicken thigh, which is why I was melt-in-your-mouth good. The flavor was light, sweet with a hint of spice. It was truly a delicious appetizer and would have loved a side of veggies to eat as a whole meal.

When our entree, the Sweet Soy Wild Salmon, was served, it was really dry. Considering Asia de Cuba is supposedly a top-notch restaurant (it better be for the price on their regular menu), we decided to complain and send it back.

I'm usually torn when it comes to sending back food. If the restaurant makes a mistake, I always send it back, which happens frequently when I request no cheese on certain dishes, especially salads. But I don't normally send back food if its cooked improperly - I usually deal with it. Adam worked in the food industry and the thought of someone being upset with me and tampering with my food isn't worth sending it back.

However, in this situation my thinking is that if you don't send it back, the kitchen thinks everything is fine, when in fact everything is not fine. Over-firing a piece of salmon is easy to fix and a good restaurant should not have sent out an overcooked piece of fish to begin with.

Our server, although a little out of it, was happy to get us a new dish and told us he'll put in the order for medium-rare. When it did come out about 10 minutes later, it looked great, but still wasn't all that good.

The fish wasn't succulent. To me, salmon should be soft, sweet, easy to flake apart with my fork. It should melt in your mouth. This salmon, although slightly undercooked, was still tough and not that tasty. Perhaps they were giving us a shitty piece of fish because of Restaurant Week or because we complained. Regardless it was a very unremarkable dish with bland mushrooms. I wouldn't have paid $5 for this dish, seriously. I make killer salmon in comparison.

The dessert was all the rave in reviews, so we were very excited for this. It looked grand, but in fact was a little underwhelming like the fish. It was a huge portion and more than enough for 4 people to share. But I prefer quality over quantity any day.

It was coconut cake (like a spongecake) with chocolate sauce, a scoop of coconut ice-cream and some weird cream layered into the cake. It was good at moments if you got the right combination of cake to cream and chocolate sauce, but most of the time you were just eating dry coconut cake. We should have gone with the sorbet.

Overall, Asia de Cuba sounds like a good idea, but all it really is is a lot of hype. It's in an expensive hotel in an expensive area catering to rich people who apparently don't know good food. If you look at the menu, most of their dishes are cheap foods spiced up with fancy sauce. Sure sauce is important, but I would rather have a good piece of fish with little seasoning than a crappy piece of fish dunked in glaze. They're obviously hiding their low quality food with sauces. There are SO many incredible restaurants in NYC and I'll be sure to try some where else before ever coming here again.

Asia de Cuba only get 2.5 stars in my book!