A guy walks into a bar: Señor Wong's

The Look: Hidden just above street level in the Kellogg Square building in downtown St. Paul, Señor Wong’s location leaves a little to be desired.  Although the dining room looks out over 4th Street, the windows in the lounge offer a stale view of the building’s lobby/walkway and makes you feel like you’re in a shopping mall. But the restaurant itself is quietly lit and coated in blood-red paint, simply adorned with statues and tapestries from Asian cultures. The space is roomy and contains a dining room, a game area with pool tables and dartboards, and a casual lounge.

The Crowd: In the heart of a Saturday night the dining room had been mostly vacated, but the rest of the restaurant hosted a small but steady mix of thirty-something night-lifers. The clientele, like the menu at Señor Wong’s, is notably diverse.

The Drinks: The friendly folks at Señor Wong’s want you to have a good time and they offer a wide variety of refreshments to help you get there. Their drink menu has beer, wine, sake, and a long list of specialty cocktails containing muddled drinks, martinis, and large, fruity cocktails served in 22 oz. fishbowl glasses. Their signature drink, the “Donkey Punch,” is a walloping mix of four rums cut with fruit juice—but I wasn’t feeling that nasty. Instead, my date and I decided to go tropical. The “Brooke Shields,” an homage to The Blue Lagoon, was a juicy, blue concoction of vodka, blue curacao, passionfruit, and pineapple. Disappointingly, “Brooke” arrived naked and ungarnished; a little umbrella and a pineapple wedge would have gone a long way. Nevertheless, it was as sweet, pretty, and delicious as the name suggests.

After sampling a few other options from the list, we found another winner in the “Chupacabra.” Essentially, the “Chupacabra” is just a simple margarita with quality ingredients (Cazadores Reposado, Grand Marnier, and house limeade). But, it was a very good margarita.

The cocktails at Señor Wong’s are not as subtle or well-crafted as some others in town and they tend towards being overly sweet, but they are definitely fun. And it is worth mentioning that our server, Alicia, was delightful and happily engaged us in conversation about our many options.

The Menu: The food at Señor Wong’s is a zesty palette of flavors from Vietnam, Korea, China, and Latin America. They could easily let such a mish-mash get as muddled as one of their mojitos, but they don’t attempt to bite off more than they can chew by fusing these culinary traditions. Instead they offer flavorful preparations from each of these styles on an ambitiously large menu serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner. (The Borracho nachos hit the spot!)

The Verdict: Senor Woñg is having a party and he would love it if you would join him. There are DJs on the weekend evenings, happy hours almost every day of the week, and food and drink flavors to satisfy a variety of appetites. They can accommodate almost any occasion—although I wouldn’t recommend proposing marriage, that would just be “wong.”

Add a comment