A & B Cafe

Great place, took a little bit for the chicken to come out but the food was great for the price you pay. I ordered a beef brisket curry along with the chicken wings… which are damn good and will be a must have every time I go there now! Awesome thing is you get tea while you wait for the food to come out too. The girl helping us was great too! Mahalo !

Under new management– this place is still unstable. The kitchen is slow and the owners don’t give a damn about it.

Been coming here every now and then since I was 6. Mom used to take me here to drink hot Ovaltine beef chow fun. Same waitress lady, same style cooking, new owners come and go. Food is cheap, salty, and filling. Can’t beat that for lunch. I also like it because it isn’t infested with hordes of male tech workers and the gwai-low’s. Just straight up southern Cantonese folks.

Family owned business is the best value of this restaurant. When you go in for a cup of milk tea, it’s all about the taste of everyday relationship. For starter, satay beef noodles is best for breakfast. At lunch time, you can enjoy a dish of bittermelon with beef. There is also broiled cheese with tomato pork chop over rice fresh out of hot oven. Delicious!

Cash Only.
Now that’s out of the way, there aren’t too many places to get authentic Hong Kong style breakfast and lunch in Seattle. HK bistro and Purple Dot offer some of the items that make up an HK breakfast but not enough.
I’ve been coming here since I was a kid, and the food here brings me back to when I was an even littler kid, drinking milk tea (hot) with my grandma, eating french toast, satay beef on macaroni in broth (one of my favs). They also have breakfast specials, a dish with a hot milk tea which is a good value.
Hong Kong cruisine has a lot of Euro influences, so french toast isn’t americanized or euro, the HK version has its own twist.
The atmosphere is old school HK café, which means old and not the cleanest place in town, with chinese news channels on the tv, just like in HK.
The owners are a couple who run it, and their english is not the best, so if you don’t speak chinese, you’re not gonna be able to access the full menu.
Which is why I gave 4 stars; besides the cleaniness, the menu isn’t fully available in English. If you look at the menus, the Chinese one is 3 times as long as the English one. Being an early immigrant from HK, my chinese reading skills suck, and if I wasn’t fluent I would not be able to order anything besides what was on the English menu.
If you’re a HK expat or the kids of HK expats, and have never been to HK, this is the closest you’ll get to the old school HK café experience in Seattle.

They are now closed Tuesdays. The signage is not in English, so you have to have someone ‘in the know’ to help you out.
Chicken wings are still the highlight of the meal, in addition to their milk tea (I add two spoons of sugar and it’s perfect).

Felt like having a warm congee and french toasr around 1030 am after waking up at 5 am. It feels totally like a hole in the wall place that is so foreign unlike other restaurant in Chinatown. Very local and it has such a deserted feeling. The sounds you hear are Chinese television, Chinese local people, and the cooking sound. I love the ambiance of this foreigness. Congee was alright. The rice was bit more textured than what I am used to. I wanted more soupier with my congee. French Toast was disgusting, it was nothing like hong kong french toasr. It was fried with coatings and not pan fried. The old oil stays in your mouth forever… I had one bite and i could not eat it at all. Do not order french toast please for your sake.

Worst dinning experience ever! It was the third time I dine in this restaurant. The first two times were in lunch hours, and today was the first time having dinner in this restaurant.
I went there with three of my friends on Friday night at around 8:30pm. We ordered three dishes: braised pork with preserved vegetable in soya sauce, veggie with oyster sauce and braised tofu with deep fried fish filet, plus we ordered four bowls of rice and I had a cup of Yuanyang/​Coffee with tea. We paid $ 32.16 total.
The braised pork with preserved vegetable in soya sauc (梅菜扣肉)was not an acceptable dish at all. They used other kind of meat (we guess it was roasted duck) instead of pork. They also put a different kind of side veggie. It was definitely a fake Chinese dish! The braised tofu with deep fried fish filet was a fare dish, but again it was not warm enough. The rice was just a little bit warm. We asked them to change for us and they did microwave the rice afterwards. Everything was not warm enough, the hottest thing we had so far was the tea they gave us.
The whole experience was horrible, and I won’t recommend this restaurant to my friends anymore.

Quaint, very inexpensive, and very small and casual. Lot of locals come here. Bring cash, since it’s cash only.

My favorite hole in the wall Chinese restaurant in International District/​Chinatown. The food is cooked the style my father used to make when I was growing up as a kid in Seattle. Great delicious food for a hearty appetite!
The prices are very good and the quantity is just right, but be prepared to pay cash only. This is the only draw back.

As a vietnamese food critic, and a foodie travel the world. This is one of the best priced menu in the entire seattle and you have to try they asked fish chicken fried rice

We only ordered the condensed milk with butter toast. The waitress gave us the peanut butter one instead of the normal butter one, which actually turned out to be pretty good. Very good prices too! Peaceful, not very crowded when we went.

A&B has amazing value for the money. It’s incredibly cheap, yet delicious home-​style food. It’s not quite as good as some of the other places around, but the portions and price more than make up for it.

I have a soft spot for «hole in the wall» «mom and pop» places and this is one of my favorites. Maybe it’s because I’ve been coming here since I was 8 years old. When I was a kid the menus underneath the glass were all in Chinese and you had to ask for an English menu. I guess times have changed and now they have the English menu right next to the Chinese. =D
The food here is delicious and the portions are big! The food is first come first serve meaning that if you ordered an appetizer and it happens to take a long time to make then it may come out last after the entrees. They do warn you though.

The Malaysian inside me is crying. Hainanese chicken rice that isn’t white. No cucumber, no chicken soup, no chili garlic. Other dishes were very mediocre as well.

I came here several times for breakfast when visiting my parents. It’s their go-​to spot for vegetarian dishes and Hong Kong coffee milk tea. I can see why, too! Cheap yet filling dishes. I especially like their vegetarian soups.
I also had their baked fish fillet, which was more like a pot pie! It was baked fish on top of rice and vegetables.
It’s a very small hole-​in-​the-​wall café — nothing extremely special, but I would recommend it for cheap, authentic Cantonese eats.

When I get done with work in the morning, all I can think about lately is breaky at A&B Café! They have $ 3.95 Chinese style breakfast til 1100 which includes your choice of congee and a side order of steamed wide rice noodle w/​dried shrimp (ha– cheung). For $ 1.60, you can add a side of fried bread (you tiao). Such huge portions for the awesome price and leaves me happy and full! They also have American style breakfast available for the same price, but why would anyone want toast, eggs, and bacon over Chinese breaky?! Another time that we went in the morning, I ordered a baked rice dish of fried rice with chicken wings and tomato sauce on top. (Who says you can’t have chicken wings for breakfast? I highly recommend this dish because it is so amazing and it is only $ 6.25 for a huge portion! Can’t wait til next time!

Cheap prices and decent food, but the service here is horrible.
Decent Hong Kong milk tea.
Don’t forget to bring cash… or else you’ll probably be stuck in the back washing dishes to pay off your meal.

THEY CHANGED THE NAME! (USED TO BE J & L Café!)
I always come here early AM to have a Chinese (cantonese style) breakfast.
Usually Order the Spam and Egg with instant Noodle Soup along with Pand Fried Dried Shrimp on a rice roll like TOM L Says (Cheong FOON) hahhaahaha.
Adding a Hong Kong Style Hot Milk Tea which is pretty good there. (For under $ 8.00)
If you have a bigger group you can always add the Chinese wrap sticky rice and share it with amongs people. So you get to try a bit of everything.
Everything else seems pretty good, price is pretty descent compare to other breakfast places. The Congee ($ 4.00) here is pretty thick and chunks of meat and Preserved Eggs.
I would recommend people to come here and try it out! The only thing that I dislike is the Staff, they are confused and always messes up my order, they look angry but they are not. Expect a little wait if the place is near full.

A & B Café seems to be relatively undiscovered compared to the other HK cafes that people frequent, such as HK Bistro, Purple Dot, and Bistro 663. However, the food and prices are on par with other places.
Standard HK café selection of food — soup noodles, fried noodles, chow fun, rice plates, fried rice, baked rice and spaghetti dishes. The salt & pepper chicken wings are pretty good.
You can eat a decent lunch here for $ 4 – 7, and items off the lunch section come with free drinks.
This place also has breakfast items typical to a HK café, such as toast and egg sandwiches.
A word of caution:
The experience here is probably better if you read Chinese and speak Cantonese or Mandarin. The English menu is a subset of the Chinese menu, and the dishes on the Chinese menu seem less Americanized and more appetizing. The waitress I see here every time is polite and attentive, but I get the impression that she doesn’t speak much English. Most of the customers here appear to be older, Chinese-​speaking International District residents.