Pacific Cafe - Hong Kong Kitchen

My friend K just moved down to Seattle from Vancouver and since this is her first real weekend in the Emerald City, I figured we should do something together instead of staying at home and watching chick flicks non-stop. During my mini tour of Seattle's International District last week, my friend R pointed out all the good Chinese restaurants around the area and I promised myself that I should visit them all one by one. Since I am a big fan of HK style cafes, and because K is now around to be my new eating buddy, I figured today is a good day to be trying out one of these restaurants. So, off to the ID (Intl District) we go, on the 550 to Seattle. The first restaurant I remembered from last weekend and the first one we saw stepping out from the station was Pacific Cafe Hong Kong Kitchen. The menu, complete with pictures, is posted on the glass window right beside the entrance and it looked very inviting.

The restaurant offers a wide variety of Chinese dishes, from oven baked to traditional Chinese to grilled steaks. And best of all, they have a good selection of drinks and desserts.

It didn't take me much time to decide on what I wanted. In HK style cafes, I always order one of the baked dishes - either the baked seafood on rice or the baked pork chop on rice. This time I went with the baked seafood on rice. It was loaded with shrimp, crab sticks and mushrooms on top, with cream sauce and cheese.  The cream sauce isn't too rich and they added just the right amount of cheese. It still doesn't beat Kingspark's, my favorite HK style cafe in Richmond where the cream sauce is a bit richer, and where they add more seafood to the dish.

K had the oven baked fish fillet with sweet corn. Her dish looked like it had more seafood in it than mine did which is why if I had to order baked seafood on rice again in this restaurant, I would just go for this one.

And because it was burning hot outside, we had to have something cold for dessert. We both ordered what we would call Mango Sago in Manila. In Pacific Cafe, it is called fresh mango with pomelo and sago with coconut mango puree. K ordered the one that didn't have pomelo or coconut in it (though it looked like there was coconut cream in hers too). As soon as a I tasted it, I fell in love with it instantly. The mango puree had the perfect consistency - not too thick and not too thin either. I think the huge chunks of mangoes included were the highlight of this dessert. The mangoes they used tasted like they were real Manila mangoes, perfectly soft and sweet. Yum!

Though I prefer Kingspark's baked seafood dish, I think I would enjoy going to this restaurant more, just because they have a wider dessert selection and there are a million other items on the menu that I cannot wait to try. After this experience, I would no longer complain that Seattle does not have good Chinese restaurants.

Pacific Cafe HK Kitchen
416 5th Ave. S,
Seattle, WA
206-682-0908