MUNCHIES [CA] . Dot’s Café at Yahoo!

by Kris   ⋅   May 11, 2007   ⋅   Comment now   ⋅    RSS

Okay, so we don’t have free gourmet roasted quail like Google does, but we do have a cute little cafeteria with lots of curves and multi-color polka dots. So there, ha! The chefs are cool and the food is okay; when I do eat in I usually opt for the Indian/Thai stuff or their veggie calzones. Today (er, the day I wrote this review a while back) they were out of the latter, so I had their Pan Seared Scallops with a Green Onion Soy-Ginger Glaze, Jade Blend Rice and Chinese Broccoli. These were teeny weeny baby scallops (oh no!) or mini scallops (okay that’s a little better) and not the supersized suckers you’d find at La Mer, but a perfect size for lunch fare. The wild rice blend was yummified with red(?) lentils and I obviously scarfed it down before I could even appreciate the multi range of colors. I’ve had hit or miss experiences with Chinese broccoli, mostly because I never chew my food, feh. If it’s undercooked, I find it stringy and if it’s overcooked drowning in tons of soy sauce it’s a downright slimy choking hazard. I know it’s lame right? I should just CHEW. Anyway, Dot’s Cafe prepared theirs perfectly crisp and they used the nice tender shoot-y tops and not the bitter rock-hard stalks some restaurants serve patrons to floss with. The whole meal was delish on the way down, but quickly followed by a powerful salty garlicky aftertaste .. best take a handful of mints on your way out.

Dot’s Cafe also has awesome awesome pizza ($2 for an extra wide slice) and occasionally offers odd excursions like the curried potato pizza (carbalicious!!) with ginormous chunks of potatoes on an in-house fire-oven toasted thin crust that was bland and flavorful at the same time. Not knocking it, I actually liked it, but it was maybe too much of a good thing — a rare moment when I did not clear my plate. Needless to say, I don’t think even sumo wrestlers need to chow down that many carbs, much less internet tech employees stuck to their seats, so it’s no surprise that I haven’t seen it on the menu since.

Overall, Dot’s Cafe is an okay spot for a fresh innovative meal, sometimes a little oily, sometimes a little bland, but a great place to grab some quick grub. Nice note: Yahoo! eateries charge a flat rate for salads by the container size rather than the weight. I was burned at Apple’s Caffè Macs when they shocked me with a nearly $10 price tag, weighing the heavy glass plate too! And the cashiers at Dot’shaven’t charged me for a “side salad” with my pizza, where Caffè Macs once tried to charge me fifty cents for (I swear) five spinach leaves. More on that later…

NOTE: Dot’s Café is not open to the public. You must be an employee or a guest of an employee to dine here.

About the Author:

Kris Kobayashi-Nelson is an avid food adventurist who has tried everything from jellyfish to sea cucumber to chicken gizzards. She is a vegetarian by day, pescetarian by night.

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