Hunger, unlike ambulance sirens, meningitis, and restraining orders, is not something you can safely ignore. Answer the mighty call of a bellowing belly with today's Groupon: for $10, you get $20 worth of Asian cuisine at Champa Garden, located in Oakland. At least one food item is required in order to use this Groupon toward grown-up beverages.

The menu at Champa Garden presents an assortment of cuisines, including Laotian, Vietnamese, Thai, and other nationalities of scrumptious Asian descent. The veggie clay pot combines two cooking methods with pan-fried silver noodles mixed with vegetables and ginger, then baked in a clay pot ($6.95)—a cooking apparatus more appropriate than the muffin tins used in back alley eateries. Lao’s noodle soup, kaow paik, is a homemade noodle soup served in chicken broth that warms the insides of any ingestor and can be augmented with chicken or seafood ($5.45 medium, add $1.50 for seafood) for a more protein-packed slurp. With all the beers at Champa Garden under $3, including Heineken ($3), Singha ($2.75), and Beer Lao ($2.75), no diner can blame the pad kea moa ($5.95)—drunken noodles—for their fragrant and boisterous company of basil, bamboo, onions, mushrooms, bell peppers, chili peppers, and choice of meat.

Reviews

The San Francisco Chronicle and East Bay Express featured Champa Express. More than 400 Yelpers give the restaurant an average of four stars, and 86% of Urbanspooners recommend it:

• Like the neighborhood, the menu offers a lively mix of cultures: Thai, Laotian, Vietnamese and Lue…This isn’t gentrification, it’s good eating. Even familiar dishes sing their own song here, and quite a few depart from the cookie-cutter Thai-Vietnamese menus of the Bay Area. – Carol Ness, San Francisco Chronicle
• Oakland's Champa Garden offers dishes from four, maybe five, cuisines, but somehow sidesteps the pitfall of trying too hard, or at least charms its way around it. – Jonathan Kauffman, East Bay Express