Lemongrass Asian Bistro – Shangri-la Plaza EDSA (Mandaluyong City)

Lemongrass Asian Bistro is a Thai, Vietnamese, and Chinese fusion restaurant in Shangri-la Mall EDSA.

A friend and I chose it because we have not had Thai food in a while and we have not dined in this restaurant before. Imagine my surprise when I found out that Lemongrass Asian Bistro is located next to and under the escalator! Moreover, everything inside has a sickly shade of yellow. Maybe it is just my eyesight or maybe it is real. It goes without saying that it has close to zero ambience.

Since we have had enough of chicken from our previous meals, we choose not to have any of those either. We pick shrimp cake as starters, pork satay and steam fish with crispy bean sauce as protein, pineapple fried rice as carbohydrates, and the most famous Thai dessert, sticky rice with ice cream and mango.

An order of shrimp cakes give a diner five decently-sized pieces and two side dishes: almost sweet and sour dip and pickled cucumber and onion. It is okay and the cucumber complements the fried shrimp cakes.

There are sticks of pork satay, whose meat veers on the thin side. It also comes with pickled cucumber and onion and peanut dipping sauce on the side. Although I cannot taste the peanut as dominant flavor of the sauce, I rather enjoy eating the pork satay.

The steam fish with crispy bean sauce is as bland as the fish looks on the photo. The sauce is thin and almost watery, which does not hold much flavor. The only cute thing about it is the shape of the dish it is placed. It is my least liked dish.

Steam fish with crispy bean sauce, P305.00 (US $6.00)

The pineapple fried rice is too sweet and too sticky. It has a good amount of shrimps, but surprisingly it has no pineapple tidbits. It is memorable for the wrong reasons.

Pineapple fried rice, P285.00 (US $5.61)

As a dessert fiend, the sticky rice with ice cream and mango is the dish I look forward to the most. Hmmmm … the sticky rice is passable. It is cooked properly and the flavor of coconut cream is pronounced. The vanilla ice cream tastes like normal ice cream, which is either good or bad. However, the mango is not ripe and has sour after taste. As a girl who grew up eating mangoes from our farm and backyard, and later on mangoes from Guimaras, it is so disappointing. We have one taste of the mango and leave it untouched afterwards.