Going To Vietnam

When you blog about food, everyone expects you to pick the place to eat. I do not like this kind of pressure at all. This stems from my dislike of decision making. This is why I love it when other people do the deciding. O said he wanted to go to Vietnam Restaurant. Done and done. They have crazy drinks here with corny names. Like this Suffering Bastard. Their drinks are not for the weak. This drink tastes awesome, but it is composed primarily of booze, booze, and more booze. Within a few sips, I was done. I do not exaggerate.

An order of the shrimp and pork spring rolls and the grilled pork spring rolls. It's been awhile since I've been anywhere where they serve the grilled pork variety. My favorites were at Pho Ba Le, and they've been closed for years now. The ones at Vietnam do not disappoint. They're a bit pricier than at the less swankier vietnamese joints, but really, it's kind of worth it! One thing that bothered all of us though was that the dipping sauce came with a dollop of spicy chili sauce on top, by default. Instead of letting us choose the spice, they put it on anyway, and it made the sauce quite spicy, probably too spicy for our liking.

O got the chicken satay. He wanted the noodle version of this, but they were out of chow fun noodles. How does a vietnamese restaurant run out of chow fun noodles on a friday night at 8PM? This was an extreme case of poor planning on the kitchen's part. This pissed O off a lot. I love chow fun noodles myself, so if I'd had a hankering for chow fun and I went to dinner on a friday night and they said they were out, I would have been pissed off too. He asked if they could just put it on top of other noodles and they said no... which I found incredibly unaccommodating. But I also think our server didn't speak english too well, so that did not help O's case. So in the end, he just ended up getting the rice version, which did not come on top of anything. But he still liked it. But I agree, it would have been so much better on top of wide, flat, chewy, rice noodles.

J went with the grilled shrimp rice plate. He liked his dish, and I especially enjoyed noshing on some of his broken rice. There's something about broken rice that I cannot get enough of.

As for me, I got a tofu and fried spring roll vermicelli bowl. I don't know what it was, I just didn't feel like having meat at my main topper that night. The tofu is pretty plain, but that's what I wanted. And you know I like tofu so everything about this was good. You can see at the bottom of my dish, the dollop of spice that also came on the vermicelli bowl. This was the stuff in the spring roll sauce too. And damn, it's really spicy. I ended up getting a number of extra spicy mouthfuls.

The service here is ok. The food is good too, slightly smaller portions than the less glamorous spots, and slightly higher price tags. The food comes out much slower than the divier joints. But the ambiance does not compare. There's not a flourescent light or vinyl flooring to be found. It's all mahogany and warmth.