The Bet at Exit 156

A few miles south of Monument, at an address that has buried three restaurants in as many years, a Chiang Mai baker’s daughter is serving rice porridge at nine in the morning. White Lotus Café and Bakery opened in November. A month later its owner closed the restaurant that had fed her family for eighteen years, to make sure this one worked.

Jasmine Andrew did not set out to cook for a living. She has a finance degree and trained as a gemologist, and spent years in California grading diamonds. What changed her direction was a plate of pad thai in Colorado Springs that she thought she could improve on.

She and her husband Harvey, an Air Force officer then stationed at Peterson, had arrived from Ohio with two small children. Six months after that meal, Harvey came home from work to learn that his wife had acquired a restaurant. A local Chinese restaurant owner, worn down by the work, had mentioned as much in passing; Andrew asked whether she could buy his equipment and take over his lease. He agreed on the spot.

NaRai Thai Restaurant opened in the Rockrimmon Safeway center in March 2008, five months after the birth of her son and roughly six months before the financial system came apart. She had never run a restaurant. A Thai chef from Denver, found through a brother’s friend in San Francisco, came down to help launch it and left within months for another job. By then Andrew had made a point of learning every station herself.

It was hard. But I was determined to make it work.

The determination was tested off the premises as well. Harvey deployed to Afghanistan during the surge, then turned around for a year in Riyadh. Andrew ran the restaurant and raised the children. NaRai Thai became a Rockrimmon fixture and a perennial winner in the Gazette’s Best of the Springs; in February 2014, with Harvey retired from the Air Force, the couple opened a second and larger room, NaRai Siam Cuisine, in the Cheyenne Mountain area.

The Room

Eleven years later a space came open in Northgate, and Andrew took it for something she had not tried before.

The room is the first argument the restaurant makes. It is tall, bright and open, with windows that give onto Pikes Peak, wood floors, and a run of gold pendant lights shaped like lotus petals down the center of the ceiling. A single communal table seats twelve. The lighting is dim without being murky and the acoustics are forgiving — an open room that still manages to feel private, which is a harder trick than it sounds and one most restaurants in a shopping center do not attempt.

What Is Actually Different Here

The premise of White Lotus is that breakfast in most of Asia looks nothing like breakfast in most of Colorado, and that a market of 20,000-odd people north of the Air Force Academy might be persuaded to find that interesting.

The centerpiece is jok — a rice porridge, listed on the menu as What A Jok! at $14, built on fresh ginger, roasted garlic, chili oil and green onion, with Chinese crullers on the side for dipping. The crullers, youtiao, are long rather than round and are not sweet; they exist to soak up broth. Around it sits the most unusual menu in the north end: an Asian-style answer to biscuits and gravy in which the gravy is chickpea, layered with star anise, nutmeg and chili oils; a Thai omelet hiding cream cheese and cilantro, served over rice with a house ketchup of chiles, soy and garlic; and khao soi, the coconut-curry egg noodle dish of Chiang Mai, where Andrew is from — with the option to swap the traditional bone-in drumstick for a chicken schnitzel she flattens, breads and fries herself. Thai food, she notes, has been absorbing outside influences for centuries.

The same menu also runs eggs Benedict, avocado toast, a Japanese soufflé pancake and a four-sausage German breakfast plate, then turns after four o’clock into a Thai restaurant and a bar.

On the evidence of two evening visits, the kitchen is exacting. Edamame arrives warm and correctly salted, which is a small thing that a surprising number of kitchens get wrong. The curried croquettes are the better opener: panko crust, a soft curried potato interior, and a tonkatsu sauce with enough acid to cut them. A yellow curry came at the requested heat with rice cooked properly, neither gummy nor dry. From the fusion specials — the most interesting corner of the menu — the spaghetti with truffle cream and grilled scallops was the best plate of either visit, and on its own reason to come back.

The one misstep was instructive. A lobster seafood pad thai was swapped in the pass with a neighboring table’s shrimp version and arrived at the wrong seat. The staff caught it, apologized, and moved to fire a replacement without being asked. The shrimp pad thai was, for what it is worth, very good. Service on both visits was attentive without hovering, and the recovery was faster than the error.

Three Days for a Croissant

The bakery is the part Andrew appears least willing to compromise on, which is unsurprising: she grew up the youngest of ten children in her father’s bakery in northern Thailand, and her brothers worked in it too.

The case started with a handful of Asian-inspired sweets and now holds whole cakes, a pandan cake at $12, mini cheesecakes, tarts and flan, alongside Japanese shio pan butter rolls — pillowy dough wrapped around a cube of French butter that melts as it bakes and leaves a crisp base, finished with salt. The rollout was slow by choice. She told the Gazette in May that she had tried several butters and ready-made laminated products, but none of them were the flavor she was looking for, and settled on Isigny Ste Mère beurre de tourage, a French laminating butter.

Butter rolls ($3.50) and chicken curry puffs ($5) are available daily. Croissants, which take her three days, appear only on weekends — a constraint of one person’s hands rather than one person’s ambition. She is, she told the paper, trying to find someone to train to help her.

The case was well stocked on a recent evening. A chocolate-filled croissant and a few cheesecake bites went home. The pastry itself was excellent; the chocolate croissant was underfilled and would be improved by more of it, and by a drizzle on top to signal what is inside. The cheesecake bites are the more useful item — small enough to be a sweet without becoming an event.

The Address

13141 Bass Pro Drive has not been kind to its tenants. A sushi bar, D-Station, and a breakfast-and-burgers restaurant, Buttermilk, both came and went; the most recent occupant, Notes Eatery — jazz brunches, signed guitars on the walls — closed in July 2025. All three are listed as closed at the address.

Andrew’s answer to that history was to remove her own safety net. In December 2025, one month after opening White Lotus, she closed NaRai Thai Restaurant — the Rockrimmon room she had taken over from a tired stranger eighteen years earlier — describing it on the company’s website as a difficult decision, made so the family could put maximum focus on the new venture. NaRai Siam remains open.

Which leaves the one thing that should worry her, and it is not the cooking. Neither visit found the room close to full. A kitchen this precise, in a room this handsome, with a bakery case run by someone who spends three days on a croissant, ought to be busy. What White Lotus lacks is not quality but a Tri-Lakes public that knows it is there — and the drive is only a few miles south of Monument.

Eighteen years ago Jasmine Andrew bought a restaurant from a man who wanted out. This time she was the one who walked away from a room that worked, and did it on purpose. Whether 13141 Bass Pro Drive finally keeps a tenant is no longer entirely her decision to make. It belongs to whoever decides to make the drive.

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Sources & further reading

The Independent’s own coverage: reporting for this profile draws on two visits to White Lotus Café and Bakery. See also our Business Spotlight on Lake & Lantern Café in Palmer Lake.

The business: White Lotus Café, “Our Story” · the café’s menu · NaRai Siam Cuisine’s company history, the source for the 2008, 2014 and 2025 dates and for the closure of NaRai Thai.

Press: Teresa Farney, “White Lotus Café and Bakery brings Thai breakfasts to Colorado Springs,” The Gazette, Feb. 3, 2026 · “Follow the creamy butter trail to White Lotus Café and Bakery,” The Gazette, May 15, 2026.

The address: business listings for Notes Eatery, D-Station and Buttermilk Breakfast & Burgers, all at 13141 Bass Pro Drive and all marked closed.

Menu items and prices are current as of publication and subject to change. The Monument Independent accepts no payment for Business Spotlight coverage; these visits were paid for by the newsroom. Photographs by The Monument Independent.