A real lulu at Lulu's Asian Bistro

Vicky Cristina Barcelona was playing at the Lyric Cinema Cafe, and I biked over one afternoon to meet up with two friends to take it in. After our hour and a half of drooling over Javier Bardem, KS went home but MC and I walked over to Old Town to have dinner.

Spanish food would have been appropriate, but there were no tapas joints in sight. In the end, we decided on Lulu's Asian Bistro, a place I felt both curious about and leery of when I entered. It was friendly and clean—definitely no Chinatown hole-in-the-wall—but for me, the menu wasn't very promising. Like many of the Asian restaurants around here, it offered a mish-mash of greatest hits from the Asian food trifecta: Thai, Chinese, and Japanese. I guess I should have known better than to go for sushi and pad thai in a place like this, but hey, we were both having cravings.

Well—the sushi wasn't bad, exactly. It just wasn't great. And the pad thai tasted nothing like what I expected, veering away from authenticity even more than this (b)ad thai. If at Bennie's the dish was too gloppy and sugary, here the entire flavoring was wrong, as if ol' Lulu was cooking up another noodle dish altogether. It tasted okay, but as pad thai…no, no, and no.

I've mentioned before how I feel about places that try to cover a variety of different cuisines under one roof. Let's just say that Lulu's Asian Bistro didn't do anything to change my mind.