CAFE SOYA
On 9 August 2007 Dim and I went to China Town for dinner, as I was too tired to cook. We decided to try Café Soya for the second time (the first time was in last winter). It sells Vietnamese food as well as Chinese.
This place is really small, but is also one of the most popular Chinese in this area such that I saw once broadcasted on a national television as a Chinese family enterprise success story. It opened also a new larger place nearby, which is called Café Soya 2. This is the original outlet in the Arcadian, and still ran by the same family.
Cafe Soya is famous for its home made tofu (bean curd), so also for this soy milk. As it proved so popular, many of the Chinese cafés in the area started to offer it. The Arcadian outlet is not licensed, and if you bring in alcohol you pay the corkage, 20% of the food bill, if I remember correctly. If you are big drinkers (and small eaters), it must be still good value than to buy the drink at the premises.
This is my soy milk (£1.50), and Dim's Coca Cola (£1.60). They were offering at that time 2 for 1 for the soya milk, but Dim does not like it, so we had to refuse the offer. Price of the drink is higher by 40-50% comparing to the same thing in other Chinese cafes.
Another selling item of Cafe Soya is vegetarian food; there is a wide range of vegetarian dishes, including also artificial meat. We did not take it, but being Japanese, I would guess they offer traditional, soya bean based meat substitute (developped in Buddhist monasteries where the consumption of meat was/is prohibited).
This is one of the vegetrarian dishes, Pineapple and Coconut Fried Rice (£5.80). It looks beautiful and plenty, and tastes OK considering the absense of animal protein (except egg), but we got bored in the end eating a mountain of it.
This is my Chili Pepper Squid with Fried Rice (£7.90), from the Vietnamese menu. This chili pepper squid is one of the famous dish of Café Soya, so I had always wanted to try it.
In short word, chili pepper squid was battered and deep-fried squid served with sweet chili sauce. The problem for us was its oiliness. The batter soaked up so much oil that we did know if we were eating squid or oily batter. Even Dim, who likes deep-fried food, said it was too oily. The British people seem to like oily batter, but it was too much for us.
There was various vegetable which made the dish so colourful and vibrant, but the fried rice was again slightly too oily. It was again in big quantity. In the end I got bored eating it and could not finish it. Probably it does not worth paying almost £8 if we cannot finish it.
The bill came to a bit less than £17. The price is higher by about 20-30% comparing to nearby Chinese cafés. This time we felt to have payed too much especially because the food was not as good as we expected, but at the same time, we felt that we did not choose well (too much rice!), so we will try again in some time.
