Bamboo House

(608) 781-6996

9374 State Road 16

Onalaska, WI 54650

Menu

Why is it that every restaurant in the La Crosse area that serves Japanese food is run by Chinese people?  This is the case with Bamboo House, as it is with downtown La Crosse's Yoko's Place.  But in any case and in West Coast Guy's (WCG) opinion, there is no reason why Chinese people cannot make good Japanese food, or Italian food, or whatever.  Same with White people and everybody else.  Culture (including cuisine) is not in the blood or genes or whatever you want to call it.

But in the actual case of Bamboo House there are some shortcomings that WCG has encountered that may have something to do with Chinese people running a restaurant that purports to serve Japanese, Thai, AND Chinese food.

(true) Yakitori with green onions / ネギマ焼き鳥

One thing - for example - is pretty funny.  The menu lists "yakitori beef" as an entree.  "Yakitori" is Japanese for "bird cooking," which generally refers to some form of chicken grilled on a stick (WCG's favorite is tsukune, or grilled chicken meatballs or sausage on a stick).  Again, funny, but an indication that these people do not really know things Japanese.  

A more serious error arises when one orders "tempura" at Bamboo House.  Tempura is deep fried food, usually including shrimp and various vegetables.  (However, WCG's Nisei mom used to make tempura with bits of leftover beef and potatoes, and sometimes in Japan they make it with scallops, fish, squid, etc.).  The word "tempura" is written in Japanese with a Chinese character (kanji) that means heaven, i.e., nothing to do with shrimp, and the word/dish has its origins with Portuguese visitors to medieval Japan who would temporarily (get it?) abstain from eating beef, pork, or chicken during Lent.

Actual tempura / 天ぷら

What really defines tempura - in any case - is the batter.   It is a light batter that includes cold water, flour, and eggs.  The batter is only loosely mixed just before use, giving tempura its distinctive qualities.  Tempura is NOT breaded.  But the good people at Bamboo House either don't know this or don't care.  They seem to be banking on the fact that La Crosse people are not sophisticated enough to know the difference.  (By the way, at Yoko's Place, they serve up the same kind of "tempura.")  Breaded and deep fried food in Japan/Japanese is called "furai" (Japanese pronunciation of "fry," so for example fried shrimp would be ebi - Japanese for shrimp - furai).  ebi furai and other kinds of food in Japanese cuisine that is breaded can be very good (an example would be tonkatusu), but it is not
tempura.

Ebi furai (fry) / 海老フライ

I miss real tempura, don't like to deep fry at home, and would have to drive to Madison or the cities - probably - to get it.

To be fair, Bamboo House's sushi is pretty good.  Perhaps the sushi guys are Japanese?  In any case, they seem pretty well trained.  And Bamboo House has all the standard kinds of sushi.  They also include sabazushi, which is a nigirizushi (the kind with a square piece of rice and something on top, not a roll) topped with cured mackerel.  WCG is very, very happy that they have this.  The way they do it is actually specific to western Japan (not Tokyo) and it is more or less like WCG's aunties back home make it.  

But there is a problem here too.  on several occasions, WCG has ordered sabazushi for takeout - often being careful to say it in Japanese and English and specify the number Bamboo House's menu gives it - and yet instead Bamboo House's manager (owner) has handed him a paper bag that includes sake (salmon) topped nigirizushi instead.  Sake (and yes it is written the same as the stuff you drink) is fine, but it is NOT Saba.

Sabazushi / さばずし

WCG has surmised that these people do not really understand what is on their menu.  Which is too bad because some of their food is pretty good.

In addition to the above, WCG has sampled Bamboo House's teriyaki (chicken and beef), orange chicken, Thai and Vietnamese egg rolls/spring rolls, gyoza (which they misspell in their own menu as "goyza") - something non-Jewish people eat?), sunomono (a kind of salad with a Japanese vinegarette), and "honey walnuts shrimp."

All of this was passable or good (unless one has a problem with the heavy and thick breading on the orange chicken), with the exception of "honey walnuts shrimp."  Back where WCG used to live, a Chinese restaurant made an identically named dish, and it was pretty good.  Bamboo House's version is disgusting.  The shrimp was heavily breaded, which comes with the territory; the problem was the sauce, which reminds one of vanilla pudding.  One day last winter, WCG ordered this for takeout.  WCG loves shrimp, and the dish is not cheap.  But it was simply inedible.  It went to waste.

Note: WCG loves Thai food, so he was - as one might expect - thrilled to hear that Bamboo House's menu includes Thai dishes.  Unfortunately, these are not really Thai at all.  They are vague (at best) approximations of Thai food made by - apparently - Chinese chefs who do not bother to find out how Thai food is in actuality made.  For example, in their various "Thai" curries, they use corn starch to thicken the sauce, which is a very common "trick" with Chinese cuisine (at least in North America).  This is in my experience never done with actual Thai curries, which tend to be not thick at all, but almost soup-like in consistency (but not flavor).  The stuff at Bamboo House is not horrible, but it is not great, and it is certainly not Thai.

WCG has not tried what Bamboo House and Yoko's call "hibachi."  On the coasts and in Japan this style of cooking is called teppanyaki, which means cooking on a flat griddle, which is what it is (sometimes, Wikipedia deserves some credit, as here, where the article points out some confusion).  This is not a very traditional - or popular - style of cooking/kind of food in Japan.  It was invented to more or less serve occupying Americans in the wake of Japan's defeat in 1945.  In the 1960s a Japanese expatriate living in New York named Rocky Aoki introduced the US proper to teppanyaki with his Benihana's of Tokyo restaurant, which is now fully an American company run by Americans, that has franchises across the planet (nearly everywhere except Tokyo or Japan in general).

Teppanyaki (AKA "hibachi") cooking is not about the food.  One is paying for the show, which means the tricks the chefs do as they cook your beef, shrimp, chicken, and vegetables at your table.  WCG's parents would take him to the Benihana's back home when he was a kid, on special occasions, and it was fun, but as an adult, WCG is not much interested in such things.

Teppanyaki, the Benihana's experience

All in all, Bamboo House has some positive qualities.  The sushi is good, and so are the appetizers and some of the entrees.  But beware of "honey walnuts shrimp" and whatever other unpleasant surprises are on the menu.

PS: one more peeve: Bamboo House has chicken satay on their menu.  This is a Southeast Asian chicken on a skewer dish that is often featured as a starter at Thai restaurants.  In Thai restaurants it is served with two condiments: a peanut sauce made with coconut milk, and a sweet and spicy vinegar with cucumbers and maybe red onions in it.  Bamboo House's menu says that it comes with the peanut sauce (and not the other thing, fine....).  Grilled chicken with peanut sauce is delicious.  So what if it is not satay in the Thai sense (where the chicken meat is marinated in coconut milk).  But, the people at Bamboo House don't seem to ever read their own menu because WCG didn't get his peanut sauce with takeout once.  The next time he ordered satay, he tried to make sure that the peanut sauce was included, and the owner/manager wasn't even aware that peanut sauce comes with satay - in general, and according to his own menu....

Chicken Satay With Condiments

PPS: WCG went to Bamboo House on a special day for him and got a lot of sushi.  The rice was not seasoned enough.  To all who purportedly prepare sushi: sushi rice is NOT a kind of rice.  It is just plain old Japanese short grain, somewhat sticky, somewhat unhealthy, white rice.  (At La Crosse's misnamed People's Food Co-op - should be "rich people's food co-op" - the Japanese rice sold in bulk is labled "sushi rice," when it is just plain Japanese white rice.)


What makes it sushi rice is that it is seasoned with a vinegar that is flavored with some salt and sugar.  A typical mistake of Chinese restaurants that claim to serve "sushi" is that they don't understand this.  Maybe it was just a bad day for Bamboo House, but it is unsettling that Asian restaurants in places like La Crosse seem to be run by people who think that they can do whatever they want and call it whatever they want because they can count on the ignorance of local people.

Local people, on they other hand, sometimes think they are eating some kind of Asian food, which they may like or dislike, when in fact they are being sold something else entirely.  It is a shame.  (On the other hand, shame on them for often not knowing or caring about the significant differences between - for example - things Japanese and things Chinese, etc.)