The Bamboo Club provides delicious Asian dining

By Carrie Caine
Collegian Staff
April 12, 2006

Mall-attached restaurants rarely stand out as fine dining experiences, but the King of Prussia Mall redefines the dinner experience. With great places like The Fox and the Hound and Sullivan’s Steakhouse shoppers already have a hard time deciding how to quell the after-Tiffany’s munchies. The Bamboo Club parks itself in the “restaurant row” of King of Prussia’s Plaza, but it distinguishes itself from nearby Houlihan’s and the Cheesecake Factory with a tiki torch-lined entranceway, dim lighting that sets the mood and plush candlelit booths that make dining fun and sexy.

My Bamboo Club experience took place in the middle of a Sunday afternoon with my hopelessly platonic friend, but I’m pretty sure I could have successfully put the moves on her in a location like this. The Bamboo Club offers pan-Asian cuisine, including foods from Thailand, China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Japan, Korea, Polynesia and Indonesia. The menu overwhelms the senses with tasty descriptions of flavors, preparation methods, ingredients and origins, that seek to inform the diner about meal choices available and about the culinary tradition from which they originate. Despite the exotic nature of the establishment, there are plenty of options for the Asian beginner, to put unadventurous minds at ease while still challenging the Asian-food afficionado.

An appetizer sampler platter included sesame chicken, wontons with crabmeat, egg rolls and coconut shrimp, along with three different sauces. Though we had no idea which sauce was supposed to go with what, the variety in flavors and textures was a good start to the meal.

Entrees ranged from grilled, steamed, woked and “sizzled” (which seems to mean fried) to noodle dishes and fried rice options. Most of the meals are chicken or fish-based, with plenty of vegetables served alongside them. Vegetables are also available in a variety of preparations and sauces as sides to these meals. The Bamboo Club also offers a few different daily specials that are inserted into the menu, which means that the waitress doesn’t have to recite them and the diner doesn’t have to try to hear them. Our server recommended one of the beef specials and the Pad Thai, a spicy noodle dish that every Thai food lover eats first. I enjoyed the chicken with plum sauce, which came with tender grilled chicken and vegetables as well as flavorful cooked plums. Even the brown rice was good.

The dessert menu was equally overwhelming but I eventually settled on seasonal berries flambéed over vanilla ice cream. The flambéing (which means lighting the berries on fire) took place tableside, and the dish was as fantastic as the show would have been worth it. The berries and Haagen-Dazs were the perfect palate-cleansing end in addition to a delicious but garlicky meal.

Like many nearby King of Prussia restaurants, The Bamboo Club is not cheap, particularly when compared with the fast-food joints that abound in the mall. Entrees cost between $10 and $15, and even the lunch menu is fairly expensive. This may not fit into the college student’s daily budget, but The Bamboo Club is an impressive date location and a good choice for a group of friends looking to try something new. The dishes are large enough that several people could split a few different meals, which allows diners to enjoy food from many different countries in one sitting. A full bar with an expansive drink menu rounds off the evening for the over-21 set.

cainec1@lasalle.edu