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Overall:

• Quality:

  4/5

• Vibe:

  2/5

• Service:

  3/5

• Value:

  2/5

Headline: Asian Mint Misses My Mark

We have been out of town again for about the last week or so. This means that Saturday is a lunch / grocery run day. Typically this would involve some sort of cheap Vietnamese and the Tom Thumb / CM run. However, after spending the last week eating at Portugese social houses and Tibetan restaurants in Montreal, we thought we should try something new. Well, perhaps new-ish. If I can, I try to start the day Asian and move more European as time passes, so why not Asian Mint?

Exactly, why not?

We park ourselves in the strip mall on Oak Lawn that looks fawningly over Highland Park. I'm reminded that the current space occupied by Asian Mint used to be some other sort of Asian / Indian place we went to a couple of times.

When you step inside, there's a four seater bar with the ubiquitously Dallasized big screen TV right in front of you. Could we please have some place pass on this?

The dining area is a mixture of long benches and plastic chairs. However, the overall vibe is whitebluemodern. There's some emo version of "Come As You Are" on the stereo.

We are seated at a 2 by one of the staff who sports the T-shirt and cargo pants uniform. I presume this is standard for the future.

The menu is a single double sided sheet that is kind of hard to read. They also make special note of items that can be ordered gluten free. It's a little strange, I would have thought 'spicy' instead of coeliac when I see these sorts of notes in an Asianesque place.

The offerings are very heavily weighted to the Thai, with little significant offerings nodding to the Vietnamese or Japanese cuisines.

We go for simple stuff, a Pad Kee Mau style clear noodle dish, duck curry, soda and an iced tea.

While we're waiting, we wonder if it is time or region dependent, but of the families that are in the place, the children seem to all share a similar style. To be precise, these early adolescents seem to all be slack jawed idiots with greasy ass hair. There also seems to be a lot of complaining. I see someone is wearing a 'W 2004' shirt and I don't think they're being ironic.

They also really need to axe the food network on the big screen and put on some Gurren Lagann if they want to keep with the fake-o future Asian from the 90s theme.

My curry was pleasant if not spectacular. I asked for spicy hot but got middling luke warm. Personally, I think you should sweat a little eating curry and this was more walk in the mall than getting tear gassed when the Blue Jays won the world series. The vegetables are decent and the duck breast is nicely prepared. It's a little hard combining the rice and curry given the flatware, but not a big deal.

The noodle dish she gets is fairly sizable. It has some nice pieces of fresh basil and chicken breast. The peanut sauce is slightly greasy but not drowning the noodles overall. It might be a little short on the spice in general, but it's decent.

They get kudos for reusable chopsticks.

That's it....except for the big surprise!!

So if you weren't really paying attention to the hard to read menu you would have missed the price differential at this place compared to any other decent Asian place. Soft shell crab here goes for about $11 vs say the $6-7 we paid at Sushiyama last night. My curry...CURRY...was 18 dollars! Holy crap! I think that I could have walked 30 meters in the other direction and had a three course lunch at Aurora for the same amount. In the future, that would be my choice. Alternatively, I'd pass A M over and just stop at Oishii instead.

Oh well, would I go back? I guess it was ok if kind of pricey for what you get. I suppose they have booze as well, but I could get wasted on four stools in front of my own TV, too.

Is it absolutely stupid Momofuku take Eric Nakamura there when he's in town awesome? No. I'll keep looking.