Elephant Cafe

Don’t underestimate this place for great food. Respect the level of hotness you ask for or get a lot of ice water and napkins for your forehead. Excellent

As a Laotian, this is a home run to tasting like authentic homemade Thai-Lao food. Great tasting dishes and great portion sizes!

This is my favorite Thai restaurant in Milwaukee. The curries are excellent, the noodle dishes are delicious and huge, the volcano plates (especially the tofu, surprisingly) is great, the larb is fantastic, and the Thai iced tea and coffee always make an excellent addition. The plum wine is super if you like very sweet options. All for reasonable prices and generous portions. They also went above and beyond to help out a customer who had car trouble. A+ all around.

Comfortable Thai restaurant that serves way more than one person should be able to eat. Great variety to eat from their menu, and whatever is ordered comes out pretty quickly, too. My wife and I enjoyed dining here on a weeknight and had no troubles with sound, quality of food, or service. Waitstaff was nice, the decorations were a lot of fun, and the prices were just right.

I wasn't sure what to expect when we ordered "Shumai", but it was fantastic. About the size and shape of meatballs. Great texture and flavor. Also ordered Pad Thai at spice level 3. I think I can tolerate spicy heat, so this was pushing my limit. All around great experience.

I could eat Thai food every day. It's my favorite. However, I have worn out my Thai welcome with my husband. For this reason, I have good girlfriends who will go with me instead. So imagine my surprise Sunday evening when Dan said he was so hungry he could eat anything. Anything?! Being the good wife I am, I took advantage of his vulnerable state and quickly sped to Elephant Cafe. The place is pretty cute and I love their elephant logo. We were greeted right away and could choose a table where ever we'd like. The food was great. Good crab rangoon. Good size wontons, good proportion of filling and I could see nice big pieces of the crab (maybe fake? I don't care). I'm SO, SO glad I have a go-to again for volcano tofu. My favorite was at Thai Palace (R.I.P.) and since they've closed I have missed it. Well, I like this version even better. Instead of just cabbage and carrots they have also added onions and broccoli to that party. But the real star is the tofu. Light crispy outside and really pleasant inside texture. I love this. I love their tofu preparation even better than Thai Palace, King and I, and the Vietnamese place, Hue. I asked for a spice level of 3 = medium. At other Thai places, I always ask for medium and I usually get something pretty mild. At this place, they were serious about the medium and it was fiery in my mouth. Yikes! But in a good way! Next time I might get a 2 or get a 3 but have a milk based drink instead of just water. Volcano tofu is the kind of thing I wish I could get as takeout but I'm a little skeptical of it. I worry that you get a container of sauce and a separate container of the tofu and veggies. The special thing about this dish is how the sauce sizzles in the cast iron dish and wilts and sears those veggies down a bit. But when I get a craving for it, I'll ask how they do it or just dine in. The ambiance is nice, if a little bright. Dan liked his duck curry. We had to flag the server down for a sharp knife though because there were huge chunks of it. His Thai iced coffee was also delicious. Overall we had pretty slow service. Our server took a while to take our order and an even longer time to get us all settled up at the end of the meal. There was no check-in to see how things were. It was 20 minutes from finishing before we were able to leave. Our server brought to-go containers but I had to ask for a bag when she came around again. I could see if we had one or two to-go containers but we had 3? The place was pretty busy on this Sunday night and there were just two servers for the whole place. I hope next time is better.