Cafe Won Kee

There are places where I go to eat not because I like the food, but simply out of convenience. 7-Eleven is a prime example - although I think their sandwiches are appalling, when my IT job causes me to stagger out of the office at 3am feeling ravenously hungry, it's off to 7-Eleven I go. On such occasions, I wistfully wonder if good food and convenience are mutually exclusive. Fortunately, there are places where one can have both - Cafe Won Kee Chinese restaurant in Milpitas is such a place.


I find Won Kee to be very convenient because their service is really fast and they don't take an afternoon break between lunch and dinnertime. It's one of my favorite places to go for a quick lunch after 3pm, when most other restaurants are closed. On top of the convenience, the food is quite good too. I usually go for one of the rice plates - which are large, tasty, and served steaming hot (usually arriving within a few minutes after I order). Among my favorites are:

Beef with tender greens:


Beef with egg:


My wife likes the spicy beef noodles:


My wife and I were intrigued when we saw that they offered snake soup, so we decided to give it a try:


The snake kinda tastes like chicken, although it was hard to really taste the snake meat since the soup contained too much ginger, which overpowered the flavor of all the other ingredients.

I'm also a big fan of their roasted duck. I brought one of these birds to a potluck and it got rave reviews.


It's also fun to meet the aquatic life that lurk in the fish tanks at Won Kee, like this handsome fellow: