Sun Cafe Proves BBQ Pork May Not Make Everything Better

I had occasion to go up by City Hall the other day and on a desolate stretch of Reade St. between Broadway & Church streets saw two Japanese restaurants essentially right next to each other. The lunch menu at Sun Cafe looked better so I went inside to eat. The place was packed and they put me at the table always reserved for the solo diner, right next to the bathroom. After looking over the lunch menu I was trying to decide between gyoza and roast pork when I spotted the house special udon soup ($8) which contained both of these items. How could anything with roast pork and gyoza be bad?

My accompaniment to the meal (besides the non-stop monologue on the food in front of her from the woman seated next to me) was a bowl of salad. If you order anything but noodles or soup off the lunch menu you get salad or soup and rice. They have a lot of good stuff, like coconut shrimp and chicken curry but I was drawn to the udon.

I was at first confused whether this was even soup, but there was broth present and udon noodles, so I guess yes? On top of the broth and noodles was a pile of pork that was slathered in barbeque sauce. Adding to the confusion was the two gyoza that were indeed crispy as advertised because they appeared to have been deep fried. They worked well in the soup because the outer coating got soft, but they were more like fried wontons than gyoza.

I ate the pile of the pork in order to get to the noodles below and discovered chunks of tofu, seaweed and a bunch of broccoli underneath. It was like a lunchtime archaeological dig! By the time I ate the noodles and took a slurp of the broth I was unsurprised that it tasted mostly of barbeque sauce.

There wasn’t anything terrible about the soup if all of the elements were eaten separately (which was my strategy), but all in all it was strange. Still, if you’re torn between a couple of things, you can’t go wrong getting them all plopped in a bowl together.

THE + (What somebody who likes this place would say)

  • There are a lot of options on the lunch menu, all under $10.
  • I can get BBQ pork, gyoza and udon all in one bowl!

THE — (What somebody who doesn’t like this place would say)

  • Some of the things on the menu sound good but turn out to be weird.
  • What’s up with the fried gyoza?

Sun Cafe, 67 Reade St. (btw. Broadway & Church), (212) 608-3822

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