Your prejudging Cassia is your loss. The chef, Bryant, was raised in Singapore. His wife was raised in Vietnam.
Bryant makes his own fish sauce from a recipe he got from his wife’s mother. If that’s not “authentic” enough for you, I don’t know what is.
For anyone who eats at Cassia, I highly recommend the chickpea curry. It is absolutely delicious.
I took the time to look through the menu, and the menu doesn’t interest me! I’m so glad you enjoy Cassia and their chickpea curry–you should be glad you won’t be waiting on a table or worrying if they’ll run out of the curry on my account. Cheers, have a great day!
I gather that your M.O. is to solicit opinions so that you can make fun of them.
You gather incorrectly–I’m just here to talk about food, and I have no time for engaging in personal nonsense. As I said before, I’m so glad you enjoy Cassia, even though their menu doesn’t interest me. It’s not personal–I’m sure there are places I like that don’t interest you in the least, too! No need to try to pick an argument over different tastes in restaurants…
If all I did was read the menu, I probably wouldn’t have eaten at Cassia either.
thank the deity of your choice that some menus feature pictures.
Having just returned from Singapore, if you focus only on the food hawker stalls (by which I mean ignore the butcher/fish/fruit areas in the hawker centers, which I agree would probably be a little much for your average westsider), I think that the concept would be quite intelligible to people from across LA (unless the long lunch lines for food trucks that are almost certainly less sanitary than the hawker stalls and the resounding success of the food-centered Century City Mall and Grand Central Market are all figments of my imagination). Besides the ridiculously low prices, of course 
Man would I like to have a good spot for asam laksa that isn’t as expensive as Cassia though
If you can make over by Pasadena City College during the weekdays, there’s a little eatery across the street called QQ Kopitiam, and they’re only open from 11 to 7pm. Laksa, Char Kway Teow… It’s run by a Singaporean family.
That’s going on my map. 15-minute walk from Allen Station on the Gold Line.
Are you endorsing it? What do you recommend? I heard about this one a while ago, but have held off on visiting due to some early mixed reports and the fact that I am almost never in Pasadena.
Been there a couple of times and liked the food, but it’s been a couple of years. Went back a few months ago, but had no cash on me. When I whipped out my Capital One MC to pay for my order, they said they accept all MC & Visa except Capital One. Seriously?
Anyhow, a good laksa is hard to find these days in LA, and outside of Cassia, this is the only other decent rendition of it that I know.
How does that make any sense? Their agreements are with VISA, MC, AmEx, Discover, etc., I thought?
No, and I just wasn’t in the mood to argue. They didn’t even care that they loss my business for that visit.
i like qq kopitam.
as for the other issue: simply put, the more benefits cards pay back to the card bearers, the more the gouging they do to the vendor. the cheapest cards charge about 1.65%, the worst charge over 3% but it’s usually the change per transaction that really hurts on smaller ticket items. it’s usually somewhere between $.10 & $.17, but let’s use $.25 because the math is easier: on a $10 ticket, $.25 is an extra 2.5% on top of the interchange rate. finally, this doesn’t account for the margin charged by the provider of the credit card service on every transaction. the margin is at the discretion of the sales person. if you manage to negotiate a good rate with the provider, you’ll end up paying about 2,2% overall if you average about $100 a ticket item.
What’s the restaurant?
the dessert? it’s in parenthesis… singapore banana leaf.
