Sasa Kitchen — Restaurant in Salt Lake City

The original owner Lisa from Asian App+ in Valley Fair Mall at WVC started SASA Kitchen earlier this year. The location used to be a western style bakery café, and they spent quite a bit of time converting to a Taiwanese style café with a bubble tea station and kitchen. They definitely started off to a bumpy start initially changing from a mall food court setup to a full blown restaurant.

Popcorn Chicken was actually pretty good, lightly breaded with exotic Asian spices on them. Their chicken wings were decent too, may take a bit for them to prepare them. Fried Bread was a good starter dish to get if you have children (or childish adults?), dip them into sweet milks tastes like Asian scones. Squid Balls (or Takoyaki from Japanese restaurants) were ok, above average for Utah, and best in the world definitely from the streets of Osaka in Japan, but I am not comparing it with that.

All of their noodle dishes can be mixed and match with all of their available proteins. Hot & Sour Beef Rice Noodles was their most popular dish from Asian App, and still is one the favorite dish here. For the brave white souls and Asian, they actually have decent intestine that goes well with their noodles, I got the Intestine Ramen last time that tasted rather nice, which mean they cleaned them pretty good.

Bubble teas are good starter item too, they are a little different though, since smoothies do not come with boba, only milk tea does. Mango is still my favorite choice.

In the beginning, the menu was too big, food was bland and inconsistent, and service was chaotic. Now the menu had been shrink down, food resembled more to ones we had back in Asian App, and service was much better... and I think almost everyone can speak English now. It will definitely be a Day and Night experience if you visited them during the first few months compared to...

In short: Food is bad to mediocre, service is plain bad, and they have the audacity to added a tip for themselves. Don't go.

In detail: We got three dishes: dry pot spicy chicken, spicy soup noodle, and sour and spicy cold noodle. When you claim to be dry POT and charge 17.99, typically it would come in a larger portion and made with assorted vegetables along side of the main protein bc that's literally what a dry pot 干锅 is, but not them. They used maybe a palm size chicken breast for the whole thing with nothing but dry peppers, and the chicken is in SLICES. Spicy chicken, at least decent ones, should be in chunks and made with chicken thigh. Just Google 辣子鸡 and you will never see the meat in slices, like what?? The spicy soup noodle is ok at best. Soup isn't all that flavorful, meat taste prepackaged. Sour and spicy cold noodles was only ok too, but they definitely used laoganma in their sauce. This is how you know they don't care about their food. I've also seen better presentation of this dish from other people's post on social media so I guess they don't care about quality control too. Service wise, you seat yourself but it still took them a really long time to get to us. The lady sounded impatient as hell when taking our order, as if we should know better how things work here, we're Chinese so no language barrier there. No one brought the check either so we went up to pay, we left no tip cause we got no service and yet they put down a $5 tip for themselves that we found out on our bank statement recently. Also the bathroom...

YES! Finally...a Chinese restaurant worth eating at. This restaurant is what Chinese restaurants should be, and I sincerely hope this is the direction that Chinese food is headed. Here's what's good:

Good, fresh food. The noodles were perfectly cooked and the broth was delicious. The restaurant is clean, open, and inviting. The flavors and textures are fresh.

Focused menu: The issue most Chinese restaurants have is that they don't have an identity: they try to make everything and end up with a 300 item menu with nothing you really want to eat. Sasa Kitchen has one sub-cuisine in the mammoth cuisine that is China. It's a noodle house. They serve soup with noodles. If you like soup and noodles, this is somewhere you should eat. If you want orange chicken, go somewhere else. There's essentially five styles of noodle they offer. Each one has options for which protein you want. And there's apps (octopus balls...awesome!).

Authentic. My dish was a legitimate reminder of the noodles I had in China. The flavors were spot on, the texture and the cooking method were true to form. The fact that they have a pork intestine soup shows that the owners are not afraid to serve authentic Chinese cuisine. I am no fan of that particular kind of soup (on account of the whole eating intestines thing), but it's a popular option for the Chinese and I'm told by fans of pork intestine that it's delicious. If you want spicy, they've got serious spicy cred. The spicy soup is a seething mass of deep red firey...