To fully clinch the eating experience at Bambu Bistro, you must allow its firecracker-friendly owner to engage you in spirited conversation about her love for Asian culture, her culinary adventures that took her to Vietnam and the impending demolition of the little strip plaza in which she operates.

Alexandria Melchior bestows customers with an acute, feel-good welcome at her two-year-old bistro, which spills over with dishes fused not to American or European cuisine, but to those within the Asian continent itself. To call her menu “Asian fusion” is something of a modern-day misnomer.

The eatery is quainter than it looks when peering in from the outside windows, thanks to a generously mirrored wall and breezy pastel acrylics set against cucumber green. Nine red umbrellas float from the ceiling, effectively muting the potential glare from track lighting. And the social chatter runs high, as Melchior seems to know everybody who drops in or else makes friends quickly when whisking out of the kitchen. To our surprise, she isn’t Asian. And by the end of our lunch, she was showing us an album of loosely arranged photos from her culinary escapades in Vietnam and telling us about her defection from French cooking to scouting out the best grains of rice for her foray into Asian cuisine.

If you wonder, like we did, whether to order from the counter with the day’s chalkboard specials looming behind it or to seize a table and hold out for wait service – do the latter. Just be sure to hang on to your fork between courses (and cutting knife if you get one) because the wait service here is relaxed and unpremeditated.

For carnivores, the Earth, Wind and Sea appetizer skewers serve as a guidepost before ordering further. Steak, chicken and shrimp are impaled alternately on the bamboo sticks, and each carried pretty much the same flavor and texture when appearing in several other preparations that ensued. The steak pieces swung randomly from baby-tender to molar-challenging; the shrimp were waterlogged and robbed of flavor; and the thigh-meat chicken was pleasant in the usual teriyaki sense.

Big, frilly Lettuce Boats filled with boiled tender chicken and diffused in bean sprouts and colorful veggies proved more exciting. In the case of both appetizers, we dabbed into an array of zestful sauces that held our interest. My companion loved the perfumed essence of the ginger-soy while I gravitated to the sharper tang of the sesame-lime sauce. Melchior’s thick and spicy peanut sauce is also noteworthy; it is slathered lovingly over a swollen Indo-Chinese burrito brimming with rice noodles, cucumbers, green onions and the abovementioned iffy steak. It’s a substantial and satisfying choice for the $7 price tag.

A large bowl of Tom Kai soup was blazingly stimulating and near traditional, except for the homey whispers of robust chicken stock that periodically pierced the flavors of coconut milk, lemon grass and basil. The serving bowl was big, and our soup could have easily sated three people.

Adobo Delight is a colorful specialty item that ushered in a return of more chicken, prettied up with jasmine rice and assorted veggies, although the broccoli florets were looking a tad anemic with their yellowish singe. Popular in the Philippines, adobo consists of meat pieces cooked in soy sauce, vinegar, bay leaf and usually lots of garlic. We could taste only the soy.

My companion was banking on sweeter tasting shrimp when he chose it for his Pha Thai Noodles. But the crustaceans, which Melchior gets from a local Thai purveyor, did little to bring an ocean essence to the dish. Like the shrimp on our skewers, they were extraordinarily plain. Salmon would have been a better choice here.

Melchior takes a healthy, if not Bohemian approach to her menu by sautéing the noodle and veggie components of her meals in water rather than oil. Compared to the majority of other Asian eateries in town, the calories you save when eating a plate of Drunken Noodles, for instance, are significant. Whatever flavor might be lost simmering in the H2O is easily replaced with Melchior’s nice selection of homemade sauces that impart fun and different spins on the food.

Sadly, the bistro and other tenants in the small strip plaza will begin looking for new homes in September, when the La Jolla Development Group will convert the space into a retail-parking structure for lofts that are going up beside it. Melchior is still undecided where she’ll continue feeding her fanfare, but seems intent on doing so.

For now, her passion for Asian cooking gives the neighborhood a compilation of recipes, where pedestrians mosey in for Zen or Mango salads, Buddha Delight, Salmon Teriyaki and unique Asian sandwiches and burritos – all at very affordable prices and served from a very affable welcome mat.