Mekong Cafe Offers Good Thai, Laotian, Vietnamese Fare

Mekong Cafe. Photo by Cari Taylor-Carlson.

Mekong Cafe, an inconspicuous restaurant located on the northwest corner of West North Avenue and North 60th streets, has an extensive buffet that it serves at both lunch and dinner. The dinner spread, served from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m., has more choices, and since I visited twice at lunchtime, I can only speak to the midday entrees, where each dish was a delightful example of Thai, Laotian or Vietnamese cuisine. When you enter this café, you will find a quiet space, a contrast to the busy intersection of North and 60th.

The first time my companions and I encountered the lunch buffet ($17.95 on weekdays and $23.95 on Saturday and Sunday), we saw an overwhelming display of choices, some familiar and some not. It’s too easy to fill your plate because it’s impossible to stop. Like my friends and me, you will want a taste of everything on this varied buffet that not only looks beautiful but, as we soon learned, tastes as good as it looks.

After working my way through this bountiful buffet twice with several friends, here’s a synopsis of what we ate. We started with appetizers: crab Rangoon, spring rolls, fried and fresh pot stickers, fried plantain and nam kow. A variety of sauces — ginger soy, plum, peanut, sweet and sour, and yes, ketchup — were available to enhance these apps. We especially liked the fresh vegetarian spring roll with peanut sauce and the crab Rangoon with sweet and sour sauce. Nam kow, a Laotian appetizer, was served with lettuce leaves to use as wraps. This is a rice salad that reminded us of paella, soft rice with crispy pieces of rice mixed in. It would be easy to make a meal of nam kow.

Before we dove into the entrees, we all enjoyed a bowl of vegetarian tom yum soup. This popular Thai soup had a deeply flavored, rich broth, some veggies and a few baby pot stickers.

From many entrees, my friends and I chose these: seafood curry, massaman curry, pad Thai, pad see eaw, basil chicken and yum nua beef. The seafood curry, made with imitation crab or surimi, was creamy and spicy, and the flavor did not suffer from the inclusion of imitation instead of real crab. The massaman curry was perfection: fragrant, rich and creamy from coconut milk.

The two familiar Thai dishes, pad Thai and pad see eaw, vegetarian entrees that included egg instead of meat, were tasty, especially the pad see eaw with its big, soft noodles and pieces of broccoli.

Basil chicken had a mild overall basil flavor and pieces of very tender chicken along with sautéed peppers. The yum nua beef, a salad of tomatoes and cucumbers, had a bright citrus flavor, but the slices of beef were a bit too chewy for my taste.

For a palate cleanser, you can order the Laotian papaya salad, a tart and sweet mix of something similar to a spicy coleslaw, or as my companion noted, “It’s zesty.”

From the fryer, we found Mekong sesame chicken and chicken tempura. The sesame chicken had a sweet-and-sour sauce, and the tempura was enhanced by the addition of more of the same sauce. All the meat was extremely tender and could only have been improved had it been served sizzling from the fryer, but for that you’d need to arrive when they open at 11 a.m.

A lovely dessert display included chocolate cake and fresh fruit, and if you wish to reproduce any of these meals at home, they sell a selection of Asian specialty groceries by the checkout counter.

There was more on the buffet, but after filling my plates twice on two visits, I had reached my limit. However, they sell takeout food by the pound, which means you can take food home from the buffet. That’s my plan for next time.

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• Location: 5930 W. North Ave.
• Phone: 414-257-2228
• Hours: Lunch buffet: 11:00 AM to 4:00 p.m. Tue-Sun; Dinner buffet: 4:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Tue-Sun (noodle bar included)
• Neighborhood: Uptown
• Website: http://www.mekong-cafe.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mekongcafemke/

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