Marco Polo bills itself a Global Restaurant. A claim easy to understand after scanning the menus. Yes, menus. There are three of them. All the vegetarian choices are collected in one, with selections like spinach ravioli (8.95) and chicken and mushroom Provencal ($9.95) in the European. The final menu has everything offered. This simplifies things while preserving the overall options. If you want to consider the vegetarian options only, why wade through a thick menu of things you won't or can’t eat? However, all menus are supplied so you can check them out, even if just to satisfy your curiosity.
Having a need for separate menus speaks to the number of dishes to choose from – there are about 75 entrées and all are excellent. The main cuisines are Italian and Chinese, but the choices are more eclectic than that: fish and chips, omelets, burgers, and salad for example. Nicole and the rest of the wait staff will patiently stand by while you try to narrow choices and decide what to actually order. Hot tea comes with the meal but there are many other beverage choices.
Jackey and Cathay Cheung opened the restaurant in 2001 after moving from Hong Kong prior to its handover back to the Chinese. Jackey is a vegetarian and wanted to have a vegetarian restaurant. She’s also a realist, so you’ll find plenty of dishes with meat: top sirloin steak ($10.95), grilled chicken burger ($5.95), curry salmon or shrimp ($9.95), or raspberry pistachio chicken ($10.95) to cite only a few choices.
There’s a broad range (see partial menu below) of vegetarian choices, many including textured soy protein "meat" in various flavors. A number of dishes offer a choice between "meat" and cubes of deep fried tofu (which I really like, thank you) and a few dishes actually include both.
Being a big fan of hot and spicy I highly recommend the Kung Pao tofu dishes ($7.95-8.95) or the veggie curry fried rice ($6.95), which can be had with tofu or "meat." I’ve found ordering "hot" satisfies my expectations, but you can ask for "medium" with extra sauce on the side for making your own adjustments.
I love their sauces; not just the accompaniments like the wonderful olive oil, garlic and herb dipping sauce for bread, but the sauces in which the dishes are served as well. I’ve found many Asian sauces fairly tasteless with a slick texture that seems to merely hold the vegetables into a kind of gelatinous mass -- but that’s not true here. Everything has distinct and pleasurable flavor.
For lunch there’s an extremely popular buffet ($5.95), with a large number of clearly labeled dishes.
You could easily envision Marco, or yourself, happily encamped along the Silk Road with the Cheungs as camp cooks. And with its oh so varied menus you could make that journey partaking different dishes each day without becoming bored or being disappointed.
Open: Mon-Thurs 11am-9pm, Fri/Sat 11am-10pm
Brunch: Mon-Fri 11.30am-2pm
See map below for location.