I hear no echo

Saturday night I went out with a friend to watch another friend of ours who is in a band play. Before we hit the bar where they were playing, we went to one of our favorite restaurants here in town called Echoes of Asia. It's a combination of Thai and Vietnamese food, and everything is just scrumptious! I love Thai food! My mouth was watering for some beef satay and their chicken and cashews dish, and my friend was craving their warrior beef dish. How sad we were when we first pulled into the parking lot and discovered that the sign now read "It's Thai" instead of "Echoes of Asia". Then I thought and said to my friend that it was probably okay; that a lot of restaurants seem to go bankrupt and then re-open under a different name, so we went inside with that hope.

The decor was completely changed. Actually it was a little nicer than the Echoes decor. The waitress brought us our menus and that's where the disappointment happened. The menu was completely different. Nothing familiar was in the list. So after pondering for a bit, we both ordered an appetiser, which we split with each other, and then a main dish, again splitting. She ordered spring rolls, which were tasty as most are, and I ordered this beef salad twist thingy, where you get all these different toppings -- grilled beef, noodles, carrots, cilantro and a nice peanut dressing, and then you wrap what you want up in lettuce leaves. It was tasty, but the lettuce leaves were very small and hard to wrap around anything, so we ended up just dividing it all and making a little tossed salad on our plates. Her main dish was a beef rice dish, which was okay, but nothing to write home about, and I wanted noodles, so I ordered a shrimp noodle dish. The waitress asked me if I wanted mild, medium or hot, and apparently I wasn't paying attention when she had asked my friend this as well, because she had the brains to ask her if the medium was really hot! So I had ordered the noodle dish as medium, and it was so hot that you couldn't taste much of anything, other than burnt taste buds!

What a bummer! So we don't think we'll be going there anymore. Fortunately the band was stellar, as they always are, and the beer the bar served went down nicely too! ;-)

Olivia

More Bad News...

Last night I went out for Girls night! Woohoo!! Three of us started out for an excellent meal at an Asian restaurant that serves Thai and Korean food. Oh boy, was it good, and not at all as hot and spicy as I was afraid it might be! No, it was heavenly! We shared a few different dishes between the three of us. Toasted cashews and chicken with peppers, a beef dish that I can't remember what it was called, and some noodles with vegetables. Two of the dishes also came with a small bowl of rice, and we had our choice of jasmine or sticky rice, so we got one of each. When our bill came, we were each given a lychee nut candy, and I was amazed at how much like a lychee nut this candy actually tasted!

After our lovely dinner, we went to a bar to check out a local band that I had seen earlier in the month when my hubby and I went out to celebrate Valentines day. They are called, "More Bad News and the Horns From Hell". These guys put on a really great show, and a jam packed bar proves this every time they play! Their music consists of songs by Chicago, Steely Dan, Joe Cocker, CCR, Bob Segar and more. They are a group of eight guys, consisting of your standard, keyboard, drums, guitarist, bass player and lead singer, and then they have the three horns from hell on trombone, sax and trumpet. We had a great time singing along and dancing to their tunes in the standing room only bar!

Olivia
p.s. don't forget to !!!