Once in awhile I get the pleasant surprise/honor of being followed by certain restaurants on twitter. Some time last year a newly opened restaurant called Cafe de Cebu started following me. Located in Las Vegas, Nevada, I placed this restaurant on my places to try in Sin City.

On my most recent trip to Vegas and looking for new places to eat, I found myself at Cafe de Cebu. After reading several positive reviews and seeing many delicious looking photos, I knew it was time to mark this off of my list of bookmarks and try it for myself.

It is a little, cozy restaurant with made to order dishes. The whole place and menu is very simple. The menu consists of appetizers, entrees and desserts. They also have a special treat for those with a yelp app and who check in via yelp.

With a Yelp check-in, diners can get one free Ngo-Yong. Ngo-Yong is a crispy egg roll filled with spiced ground pork and veggies. This little egg roll turned out to be my favorite of all the items I got to try this day. Freshly fried and made, the egg roll was served super hot. Outside the wrapper was perfectly crispy and crunchy and reminded me of classic Chinese egg rolls I used to eat as a kid. Inside the egg roll was stuffed with ground pork, bamboo shoots, garlic, onions and Chinese spices consisting of star anise, cloves, fennel seeds, cinnamon and Sichuan pepper. All these ingredients combined to make a slight spicy and flavorful filling.

The entrees I got to try for my first visit at Cafe de Cebu consisted of different varieties of entrees from vegetables to pork.

For our veggie dish, we ordered chop suey. I was a fan of the nice variety of vegetables in this. This vegetable dish had cauliflower, baby corn, snow peas, red bell pepper and broccoli. The vegetables were stir fried and then mixed with a thick, starch based sauce.

Another dish that was filled with some yummy vegetables was our noodle dish. For noodles we ordered the pancit bam-i that was made up of canton and vermicelli noodles, veggies, chicken and pork. For the veggies, there were plenty of carrots, cabbage and my favorite, shiitake mushrooms. I really liked the soft shiitake mushrooms mixed in with the equally soft noodles. There was a very distinct, unique delicious taste!

After the vegetables and noodles, were the more hearty of entrees consisting of protein.

From the specials of the day, we ordered Kaldereta. Kaldereta is a beef stew with a tomato broth base. Their version had bell peppers, green peas and carrots. This dish had a very savory and spicy sauce that went well with white rice

For our pork dish, we got sugpa liempo which is made up of freshly grilled seasoned pork belly slices. This restaurant specializes in many Cebuano pork dishes and it was very evident in this dish. The pork belly was lean, tender and marinated and grilled just right. It was even tastier when dipped in vinegar.

The last entree we ordered was the boneless bangus or milkfish. As most of my blog readers know, I do not eat seafood and so I cannot comment taste wise but I did like the nice presentation of this fish. It was served with tomato, green and white onions and mango sprinkled all on top of the fish. It looked very fresh and appetizing (and did not smell fishy 😉

On our table were various sauces that could be used to compliment the dishes ordered. It was interesting to see a pinakurot sauce. We learned from our waiter that this is their own recipe of pinakurat (notice they used a letter “o” versus an “a.” Pinakurat or pinakurot is spiced vinegar sauce. I also found the ngoniong spicy sauce for the egg rolls nice for dipping the Ngo-Yong.

A lot of the above dishes were my first time to hear about and to taste. Therefore this dining experience was a tasty learning adventure for me! At the end I found myself with a new favorite egg roll, loving a new style of noodles and informed about different sauces. I don’t exactly know how Cafe de Cebu found me on twitter many months ago but I am very happy and thankful they did because it was the start of my curiosity of this place that led to eventually me trying it out. It was truly a pleasant dining experience of new food.

For more smiles, please see my recent Yelp Review about Cafe de Cebu.