Looking For Chai

Looking For Chai is a restaurant that offers Taiwanese cuisine. The restaurant is located at Bellevue, Washington, just off Highway 405. It is at Northup plaza and the plaza does offer enough parking space for all the customers. The name of the restaurant simply means "find tea", it is quite interesting.


The restaurant opens at 11AM in the morning and we got there around 12:30PM. When we got there, there were already people lining up at the door. There were 4 groups of people before us. Luckily, a table of 2 became available and we were the only party with 2 people and thus got our table right away.

As we sat down, we were given the menu and it does have a wide variety of Taiwanese dishes. The dishes in the menu varies from street food, to steaks, to hotpot.  We were quite hungry, but could not try everything that we want. So we ordered a bowl of beef noodle, Taiwanese rib rice, side dish with egg, sea weed, and tofu curd, and popcorn chicken.

The food was delivered to us rather quickly. The beef noodle came with a large bowl, but we were hoping that it had more soup in it. Along with the beef noodle, it also came with pickled cabbage, which is the best thing to have along with the soup.

Then the side dish came. The dish had less food than what we expected. There were only around 6 pieces of sea weed, 4 pieces of egg cut from 1 single egg, and the tofu curd was quite thick. It could have been sliced thinner. There were not enough sauce on the dish either.

The Taiwanese rib rice was decent and just what we expected. The rib was juice and flavorful. So nothing wrong or special here.

The popcorn chicken came with basil on top. The popcorn chicken was decent. It was fried correctly with not much grease. It also came with quite a large portion.

Before we left the restaurant, we also ordered a braised pork rice as to go. A single serve of the braised pork rice was quite large with a lot of rice. However, there was not much sauce on the rice and it was a bit tasteless and not much flavor.

Overall, we think that Looking For Chai is not the best choice for Taiwanese cuisine. Facing East would be a better choice.

Roozengaarde

Roozengaarde is a well known and popular tulip far located in Washington state. It is about an hour North of Seattle in the Skagit Valley. Every year, tens of thousands of tourists visit the tulip festival at Skagit valley to enjoy the beautiful scene of tulip flowers. There is also another tulip farm called Tulip Town, but we chose to visit Roozengaarde this time since it is a tiny bit closer.


We got to Roozengaarde around 9:30AM in the morning on the Eastern weekend and there were already so very crowded. Unlike Woodburn Tulip Farm in Oregon, Roozengaarde did not collect the fee when we parked the car. Instead, the fee was collected at the entrance after the car was parked. The entrance fee per person was $10 during the weekend. The fee was $7 during the weekday and cheaper.

Roozengaarde had a rather decent size garden with various types and colors of tulip. The display of the tulips were amazing. We were overwhelmed by the color within the garden. Other than the tulip, there were also other types of flowers to provide even more contrast in color.

Just like Woodburn Tulip Farm, Roozengaarde also had a windmill located near the entrance and most people take photo there. The windmill was actually not as interesting as the garden however.

After taking several photos at the garden, we headed to the farm area. The tulip farm area was quite small compared to Woodburn Tulip Farm. We walked over the farm within like 5 minutes and the color of the tulips at the farm was not as amazing as the ones at the garden.

By comparing the tulip farm at Woodburn and Roozengaarde, the big difference is that Roozengaarde offers experience with both garden styled tulip and a tulip farm. Woodburn Tulip Farm is literally a tulip farm, but it is still a joyful walk around the large colorful tulip farm.  In addition, Woodburn Tulip Farm has a lot of other activities such as carnival games, but Roozengaarde does not have. Furthermore, Woodburn Tulip Farm allows pets so there are many furry friends there.

We really quite enjoyed the garden at Roozengaarde as it provided a lot of opportunities for taking great photos. The tulip garden also does not require you to wear boots since it's mostly gravel walk path or on the grass. One thing to note is that you cannot walk within the rows of tulips at the farm, so make sure the rules are followed here.