I’ve been wanting to try the new restaurant for some time — Rob Shearer first mentioned it in his October column, and other neighbors sent out the word as soon as they saw the "open" sign in March. I stopped by a few weeks ago for lunch, but a sign was hanging in the window stating "closed for maintenance repairs".
Dinner this week worked out, however. Right now is prime patio weather, so my fellow diner and I chose ConFusion’s little outdoor enclave, complete with zen fountain, fireplace, and round-bulb string lights. It was a bit noisy, what with the traffic on Davis and the car wash right next door, but the ambiance was pretty nice. Other diners apparently had the same idea — the patio as full by the time we left at 7, with one lone diner eating inside the restaurant.
Servers were definitely attentive. My water glass was refilled (and offered to be refilled) probably 20 times in a 1.5-hour period. Now, to the food, after the jump:
We started with the dim sum, which were esssentially dumplings filled with shrimp, pork and sausage with a sweet chile sauce for dipping. The dish had six of them for roughly $7, and they were yummy.
As an entree, I ordered the Con Fusion cashew dish, and my friend ordered something with a much more complicated name that featured broccoli, peanuts and peanut sauce. Most of the menu items were right around $10, including ours. We both chose chicken as our meat (beef, pork and tofu were the other choices, plus seafood options like shrimp and scallops for an extra $3). The waiter also recommended the pad thai and the thai curry dishes. I love pad thai, but it’s pretty much guaranteed that I’ll like it, so I tend to try something else when testing out a new restaurant, and I’m not a curry fan, so I stayed away from that portion of the menu.
We were both pleased with our choices. The chicken and broccoli dish was pretty much drenched in peanut sauce, which my friend loved, and my dish included all kinds of crisply-cooked veggies — red peppers, onions, mushrooms, baby corn, scallions — swimming in a mild and tangy sauce. (That was another choice — mild, medium or hot could be applied to any dish.) The portions were ample, and we also loved the presentation; mine was a large square dish, and hers came in a taller square dish with a star-shaped bowl inside. The white rice was served in a pyramid shape.
The restaurant was BYOB while it was in the process of getting its liqor license, but a sign on the front window notifies customers that the license is now in hand and not to bring in their own liquor any longer. It appears that ConFusion is still working n this portion of its menu — the wrinkled print-out we were presented with the restaurant’s wine and beer list had more than half of its options crossed out.
Two more things to note: ConFusion does have lunch portions at lower prices, and serves sushi at dinner time.
