Bento Café

My friend Suzanne and I often seem to be swayed by Asian places, and a couple of people had mentioned Bento Café in Fishers to me so we decided to give it a try. It’s a cute place inside—nicer than a lot of Asian restaurants, with some modern décor and a fairly spacious dining area. If it was a little closer, it’s a place I’d try for dinner with the kids.

We started out with an order of the seafood gyoza ($4.50) and Suzanne got a bowl of egg drop soup ($2). The soup was pretty standard egg drop—a thickened chicken broth with wisps of egg in it—it had a lot of egg in it. Not really anything else in there. The gyoza (6 in an order) were really, really good. If you aren’t familiar, gyoza is just the Japanese name for dumplings—they are basically like pot stickers, only the wrapper on these is super thin and light. You can get them with various fillings, but the seafood we chose was really good and I would recommend it. It was a light mix of seafood that was probably dominated by shrimp. They were served with a light soy based sauce that had some vinegar in it. A little lighter version of the sauce you usually get with potstickers. You could tell they were housemade and very fresh. I would get these again in a second.

We also ordered two sushi rolls. They have a pretty extensive sushi menu, from really simple to very complex. We ordered the “Sweetie” roll ($11.95) and the “Oh My God” roll ($9.95). I think my favorite was the Oh My God roll even though it was enormous. It had shrimp tempura and avocado on the inside and then (a lot of) spicy tuna and tempura crunch on the outside and was topped with masago (those teeny fish eggs), eel sauce, and some scallions. Generally these are all some of my favorite items in a sushi roll. It had the right amount of crunch between the fried shrimp and the tempura bits. The tuna wasn’t the super high quality you sometimes get with spicy tuna—more of a fine, almost puree. But it still tasted good, even if we had to cut them in half with a knife to eat them.

The sweetie roll had avocado and salmon inside as well as some tempura crunch (you know I like that crunch). It was topped with thin slices of salmon that I think were lightly seared (or torched) and then spicy mayo and salmon roe. Maybe this one didn’t have quite enough variety in taste or something, because while it was good, I didn’t like it as much. I am not a huge fan of salmon roe either because sometimes it tends to be a little too fishy. This roll was a little smaller, but we still tended to cut the pieces in half to eat them.

All in all, I was intrigued by this place. Those dumplings were good enough that I would want to go back and try more of the non-sushi side of the menu (even though there are lots of other interesting sushi rolls on the menu too). There are some noodle dishes that sound good as well as bento boxes that have lots of different combos you can try several things.

Bento Café

9778 E. 116^th Street

Fishers, IN 46037

317/578-8803

http://www.indybentocafe.com/