Lao Tae

Flavor is gone, service is upside down. When this business took over from Camber, all the dishes had complex flavors. Now the menu has been revised, and even the items marked with a red pepper are flat. The waitress told us we should have asked for the spice tray to add our own, but she never offered that option. We ordered drinks (hard to find even one frayed drink menu), a salad and two entrees. The salad and one entree came together, the other entree a couple minutes later, but the drinks came much, much later. A bit of a letdown after prior great experiences.

This place used to be Camber and changed in January 2019. Seems like it's mostly the same physical layout with a different menu. Came in here for an early dinner like 6pm on a Saturday, no wait but it got busy pretty fast. It's a fairly big restaurant (especially for Montclair!). Menu was sort of pan-Southeast-Asian, fairly Americanized with nothing too adventurous or particularly exotic. Pad Thai, noodles, rice, curries, etc. Our service and food were both quite prompt, though unexciting. The $6 sangria (?!) was actually fairly good, boozy and not too sweet. Servers and layout are reasonably kid-friendly (it's not fancy) but no kid menu or crayons or anything. Moderately loud, not intimate and not a place to impress a date. Overall it was an average value considering this is the Bay Area. Would come again but not dying to.