Address: 10621 San Pablo Ave, El Cerrito, CA 94530
Hours: none listed
Parking: street
Visited: Saturday, February 26, 2011, 8pm
In Vegas, when a player is beating the house at the black-jack table, the house is smart enough to make a dealer change. Why? Because the house isn’t in the business of losing, and an advanced dealer changes that. We experienced the restaurant version of a dealer change at Sa Wooei, a small Thai place that is best known for being on the second floor of a building that has no first floor.
Sa Wooei is hard to miss, standing on stilts, nestled in the parking lot of a shady motel that’s adjacent to “Secrets”, a glowing porn shop at the base of Moeser Lane. While we parked across the street in the Safeway/CVS parking lot, this is one SPA establishment you can park under during your visit. After jaywalking across the street, we climbed up the checker-plate stairs to the front door. We were quickly taken to a seat near one of the large windows with a glorious view of the Avenue, also allowing us to see if our car was getting jacked while we ate. The young waitress left menus with us on the glass tabletop (with placemats underneath for easy cleanup) and we started flipping through the numbers. The industrial concrete frame and aluminum awnings of the exterior belied the interior, rich with detail and traditional Thai artifacts, wood paneling and floors. The interior is dominated by the second-floor views of the Safeway, CVS, Kragen, Best Gas and BART passing beyond. On the exterior of the second floor hang Thai sculptures – and interesting detail for a building easy to dismiss.
Back to the dealer change: at first the young waitress was pleasant and efficient. Towards the end of taking our order she clearly saw our notepad, and shifted into friendly overdrive. In the world of Yelpers, any guest is a potential review, but our notepad clearly called for a dealer change. After she left to put our orders in, a more senior staff member served us the rest of the way, always very thankful for our visit. It’s quite possible that the preparation of one of the dishes (the green curry) took a little longer because extra care was given to it. While these situations are unavoidable, they are not preferred. Team ESP attempts to be discrete so the review is not tainted, but there are times when our best efforts don’t do the job.
To the order. We were both hungry, making our decisions quickly: two Thai iced teas, #3 Rung Nok and #12 Tom Yum Gai for starters, #31 Gang Keow Wan (green curry) for Emily, and #51 “Sa-Wooei” Special Duck for Dave. How can you pass up a dish that’s the special dish of the restaurant? Curiously, the menu says that all entrees can be made vegetarian. We’re not quite sure how Special Duck would play out as vegetarian.
The first dish arrived: we didn’t really know what #3 Rung Nok was, outside of the description that sounded like an egg roll. We were pleasantly surprised when 4 large Medusa-like apps came our way with perfectly light and crispy wavy noodles surrounding a core of marinated ground chicken. Having never had these before it’s impossible to compare, but these were very tasty. The flaming bowl of #12 Tom Yum Gai that followed showed equal skill in the preparation: ample chicken and mushrooms bobbing in a medium-spicy coconut broth as requested. The Thai iced teas were as expected, with Emily commenting that they “taste like a sauna”, which is not a bad thing.
Restaurants rarely disclose all of the ingredients of a dish – that’s proprietary information that makes them money. Nonetheless, we here at ESP are pretty sure one of the key ingredients of the “Sa-Wooei” Special Duck is crack-cocaine. It’s impossible to compare different dishes from different restaurants, but this duck would be one of the top five dishes we’ve had on SPA, if not the single best. Emily’s green curry was good, but perhaps the weakest of the dishes, but it should be noted that she’s become a green curry aficionado. It was ordered spicy, and arrived as advertised, but in this case the heavy spice took away from the overall flavor.
After they wrapped up our leftovers, we listened to a loud patron asking for drunken noodles enough times to suggest that she was bringing the drunk to the noodles. We paid the $44 bill grabbed our goodies and were thanked about 1,000 times as we left. Thanks for dinner Sa-Wooei, you can make some fine Thai food – we’ll be back very soon.
Final cost: $44.78
Don’t lie…you two were wearing your official San Pablo Ave Restaurant Critic badges. Come clean.
Well, your review is almost enough to make me go back. I went once years ago and got the completely wrong meal and they wouldn’t switch it from the delivered meat dish to a vegetarian one – then wouldn’t take it off the bill when I couldn’t eat it. I’ve always said pooey on Sawooei but I’m almost willing to try again……