Northern Cafe Brentwood — Restaurant in Los Angeles

Overall: -Reasonable prices for the west side -Food was OK -This is more of a fast casual restaurant (you order at the counter, they give you a table tent with a number on it and bring you food)

Beef Roll (rate 3.75/5): My favorite dish that I tried there was the beef roll, which tasted good but was a little bit skimpy on the filling. $6.50

Pork soup dumplings (rate 3.5/5): these had good flavor, but they were lacking much soup and the dough was much too thick. Compared to Din Tai Fung, the dough/dumpling skin was about 3x thicker. $7.50 for 8 dumplings

Shrimp spicy wontons (rate 2/5): I was the most hopeful for these because I usually love spicy wontons at other restaurants. However, the wonton wrapper was really thick & doughy, and the sauce mixed with Chile oil was sour. $5.50 for 6 wontons

Eggplant (3/5): The eggplant was coated in a sweet & sour tasting sauce. It would have been better without the sauce, because the eggplant was cooked nicely with fairly large portions. $9.50

Dan Dan noodles (3/5): these seemed like over cooked noodles with some peanut sauce tossed on top. Not worth ordering...

I saw that this restaurant had a good rating and my husband and I decided to try for dinner. We ordered veg dumplings, veg noodles and kung pao chicken via Doordash (never got any response to my question on the order - if there was a way to substitute side of white rice with fried rice). Anyway, the food arrived and it was TERRIBLE! It all tasted so bad! The noodles were bland except they were full of ginger, the dumplings had a super weird taste, and the chicken wasn't good either. For reference, we have eaten these items at other restaurants before and know that they can be much, much better. We HATE wasting food, but we just weren't able to eat. We had to trash the dumplings as there was no way of changing their taste, and we couldn't go out to look for the needy either. We washed the noodles and chicken with water and re-cooked it with different flavors. It tasted ok, but the "hint" (overpower) of ginger in the noodles still remained. Worst $55...

When I started to work in the area in 2019, I discovered Northern Cafe and I love it. They went through a period of being closed down, reopening to take away, and finally are open again to dine in. I'm very happy for them. I have patronized them throughout the last two years. When I went to lunch yesterday, I paid with cash and it hit me that the amount I was paying was way more than I was expecting. I looked at the meant for Beef Noodle Soup and it read $13.49. I have a menu at my desk that is from 2020 and the same dish was $9.00. That's a 50% increase in price. I understand that they probably have expenses to pay from being closed but 50%!!!! That's way too much of an increase. I'm not saying I won't go there again but it's dropped way down on my list as a...