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Business & Tech

Kaya's Fusion Cuisine: A Pleasant Surprise In Havertown

This week food writer Clara Park reviews Havertown BYOB Kaya's Fusion Cuisine.

You can tell how fancy a restaurant is by how often they change the menu. Chain restaurants and fast food places typically have the same menu 365 days a year. Granted, certain items may make limited time appearances (I'm talking about you Shamrock Shake) or appear as a special here and there but what you order isn't really going to change season to season.

I've worked in four restaurants officially and countless others unofficially (i.e. I wasn't paid for my work there) and the fanciest/biggest deal of the bunch had a menu that changed daily. The other restaurants all changed their menu seasonally and I never worked anywhere where the menu was more than one page.

is a fancier restaurant than pretty much all the restaurants I've tried in Havertown. There is no snooty attitude but they take their food seriously. There is one menu for the cooler months (fall and winter) and a separate menu for warmer months (spring and summer).

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It's a BYOB with a $2 corkage fee so I brought in a bottle of Montepulciano (it was a kind gift from my cousin) to go with our dinner. Unlike other BYOB places they not only uncorked the wine but also poured it.  I'm amazed that more BYOBs don't do this. Doesn't the wine always need time to breathe? But I digress.

A bread basket and two kinds of compound butter arrived after we sat down. Compound butter just means butter with added delights to it. The two flavors of butter were strawberry coconut and savory herb butter. The strawberry butter was good but it felt more like something I would want with brunch. The herb butter was delicious.

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We ordered the calamari and goat cheese salad to start. The calamari came with a honey habanero sauce which I was so excited about but it ended up being quite mild tasting all around. The calamari were delicately fried.

The fried goat cheese round sat atop a mound of arugula with strawberries and blueberries strewn about. A balsamic glaze was drizzled all over the plate and provided a nice acidic contrast to the rich goat cheese and sweet berries. My friend could not stop raving about this salad.

For our entrees we ordered the seared duck breast over polenta and BBQ pork shank with sweet potato sticks and cole slaw. Our server warned us that the duck would be pink (another sign that this is a serious restaurant that doesn't serve overcooked, dry, well done duck) which indicated proper cooking technique and also a clientele that may not always understand that.

The duck was tasty and went well with the creamy polenta. The BBQ pork was fall off the bone tender but I wanted more sauce for so much meat (it was a very generous portion). The fried sweet potato sticks were extremely thin and shattered upon impact. The cole slaw was a cool and refreshing counterpart to the rich meat and fried bounty.

For dessert we opted for the bread pudding instead of the apparently famous cheesecake. Not to say that we didn't believe the hype but rather that we just really love bread pudding. This incarnation was warm, satisfying and so good. The blueberries made another appearance as did fresh whipped cream (no Reddi-Whip here). It was a perfect sweet ending to our meal.

The service was laid back and friendly. Our server knew the answers to all of our questions and I never felt like we were being ignored. Our food came out in a timely fashion and she checked in on us to make sure things were going well. 

The decor is simple with lots of black/dark colors and dim lighting. It would be an ideal date destination and my friend and I were actually playing "spot the couple on a date" while we waited for our food.

There were couples of all stages from early dating to married. As a BYOB it's fun to bring whatever you would like to drink, in fact there was a table with four separate bottles (my kind of people), and it's quite cost effective to boot.

It's a pleasant surprise dining at Kaya's and what's more surprising is it's nestled between much more casual pizza shops, bakeries and delis. The food that they are cooking here is a bit more refined but like I mentioned earlier, there is none of the attitude of more refined dining establishments.

Both my friend and I commented that neither of us would have known that a place like this was in this area but we are both more fortunate for having found it and you will be too.  

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