Open since August, the Ravenswood BYO Me Dee Cafe is a mere six tables squeezed in amid a wall of Thai snacks, a freezer full of mochi, and walls decorated with squabbling cartoon brats and wide-eyed, troubled-looking cows. (A herd of bipedal, urinating cows graces the wall in the loo.) The main dishes are inexpensive but decorously presented Ameri-Thai standards with hints of fusiony gimmickry—a noodle dish tossed with fat disks of Polish sausage, or grilled mushrooms with chihuahua cheese, or entrees garnished with raspberry and blackberry gumdrops.
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But Me Dee has far more to offer than that.First, there’s an unusually wide assortment of sweets—in addition to jellies and teas, there are cheesecakes and mochi; a tangle of deep-fried banana, taro, and sweet potato slices; and a trio of warm pandan-flavored Singapore cupcakes. From the freezer, a smooth, creamy lemongrass-green tea ice cream was about as good as it got: most of the other cold treats we tried were freezer burned.
She writes, “The way it works is, they give you plain rice porridge as the main dish and you can pick 4-5 sides to go with your plain congee.” A large plain congee is $3; a small is $1.50. Leela translated the sides as follows:
Deep-fried (the word is not present in Thai, but understood) plaa salid (that has been salted and dried) $5
(Homemade?) “Sweet Fish”—fish fillets pounded thin, candied, dried, deep-fried, and cut into strips $5
4805 N. Damen, 773-989-4444, medeecafe.com
