Cold Point Pub, in the Whole Foods at Plymouth Meeting, recently added many items to their previously small menu. I had a chance to preview it this week to try out some of their new offerings.  For those of you that don’t know, within the Whole Foods, Cold Point Pub serves six local rotating beers on tap, wine, and has over 300 bottled beers for take-out. And of course, you can eat there too. And now, there’s much more to choose from.

I love me some sweet potato fries so I definitely had to try those. But I also wanted to order the fish and chips. Instead of getting additional chips, I asked them to hold the extra chips. These sweet potato fries are great! There’s actually a mix of regular ones and salted ones, so with the sweet potatoes, you get some that are a little salty, and some that are just sweet. It’s a nice mix. The fish came out nice and hot! It’s a nice quality turbot fish but the batter was a bit too greasy for me. It comes with a nice homemade remoulade for dipping. There’s also some zesty slaw that I absolutely loved and devoured.
I’m a bit of a mac and cheese addict, so I had to try that! As with their takeout stuff, this mac and cheese was great. It was rich but a nice and mild dish, without a sharp taste, which is what I prefer. It’s a nice and creamy mac. It was supposed to have a breadcrumb topping, but for whatever it did not. With that, it would have been even better, but it was already pretty great.
I got the apple pie a la mode for dessert. Look at this presentation! It’s gorgeous! It’s a little mini individual pie, that’s placed on top of a slathering of what I think is dulce de leche. It’s sprinkled with cinnamon, topped with vanilla bean ice cream, and has an almond cookie thing on top (I have no idea what those things are called). This was a rather decadent apple pie! It tasted great, and the dulce de leche was a nice and luxurious touch, but I would have loved having some more apples in the pie. It was a little shy on the apple side! The variety on the new menu is great, for young and old. This mini pub is a nice and casual option, and you get plenty of food for the buck. And don’t forget, you could always go on the roof for the tacos!

I was getting a little bit of the afternoon doldrums so I made an executive decision to go to happy hour at Sampan. You know what actually truly triggered it? Twitter, yeah, seriously. Sampan actually tweeted that it was going to be happy hour soon and I totally fell for it. It’s cool though, because their happy hour is totally happiness-inducing. We sat at the kitchen bar because as you know, I love seeing my food being cooked.
The vietnamese spring roll with shrimp, pork, and mushrooms. Delightful.
The duck egg rolls with cucumber, scallion, and lime. These were chock full of hot ass duck. When I say hot, I mean hot, some fell on my chin and burned me. I didn’t mind, they were great.
The adorable kobe slider wtih soy and swiss cheese.
The kobe hot dog, sans mustard. I love that they cut it into thirds for you and that the bun is also toasted.
The filet satay with apricot soy, and mirin and the korean bbq beef satay with short rib, kimchi, and ginger. Excellent, as usual.

Surprisingly, my favorite dish of the day was the crispy brussel sprouts with fish sauce, pulled rice, and chilli. These were so unbelievably awesome! Slightly crunchy, super savory, just great. Whoever does not like brussel sprouts needs to try these!
Lastly, here’s the kim chee fried rice with shrimp, shallot, and sunny side egg. This was a giant bowl of food. It wasn’t quite spicy or kimchi enough for me, and the shrimp just seemed unnecessary, but it’s still a decent dish. These little popcorn shrimp are fairly tasteless and benign anyway, so I didn’t see the point of them. As usual, this was so much fun. It’s beyond a good deal and it’s cool to get to try so many different dishes. We ordered way too much food, which can be easy to do here with these small dishes. It sounds like since they’re so small it wouldn’t add up to much, but damn, we were beyond stuffed! I love the happy hour here!

After the miracle berry tasting, we still needed some more food. We went to Han Dynasty, but with slight apprehension about our taste buds being messed up. But you know what? Hot liquid will negate the miracle berry’s effects. So we just doused our mouths with hot tea before the food came out. And oh yeah, don’t worry, that totally did the trick. K can’t do spicy food, like at all, so we asked for the food not spicy. Then Han came around just to make sure that we didn’t want things spicy. So basically, he made everything as not spicy as possible. But well, it was still spicy. But in the Han Dynasty world, it was not spicy. Here’s the dan dan mien. What hasn’t been said about these?They’re awesome.
And these spicy crunchy cucumbers. When I went to the monthly tasting awhile back, I remembered this dish as one of my favorites. I just love this. It’s just a bowl of cucumbers that are spicy and sweet and piquant. And when eaten with rice, it’s almost perfect. It’s almost confusing how flavorful a boring cucumber can become. Thanks Han!