regarding the hot and sour soup.. sorry to hear you didn’t like it as it’s one of my favourites. it should have a nice balance between hot and sour as well as sweet (from the fish.. or meat etc). there are several different variations and that could really affect your tastes. for instance.. my sister loves it made with chicken and tofu whereas i don’t mind it with fish unless it’s extremely fishy (then i would refuse to eat it altogether). there is usually a combination of veggies but not the whole kitchen sink! lastly.. it’s common to be eating this with steamed rice and other dishes like caramel pork or chicken etc. it’s rare to find these dishes in restaurants as they are more “family style”. it’s that lovely combo that is like your comment on an earlier blog.. the soup.. the meat.. the veggie.. :)

you’re right. although pho.. sandwiches and salad rolls are good.. there is a lot more to vietnamese cuisine! just had to put in a good word for my people! btw.. my mother makes the best sauce for salad rolls. none of that peanut sauce stuff they tend to serve you in restaurants.

I’ll make it brief. In short we were quite disappointed. My #13 large well-done beef noodle with tripe and tendons came with, well, no tripe and tendons (if there were any they were microscopic). In fact I asked for the beef well-done but it still arrived raw. And it was quite obvious there wasn’t much noodles, maybe 2/3 of the portion most other places I’ve been to would provide. The soup was decent, though. Wife ordered grilled lemongrass chicken on rice. There was only a small portion (size of my hand palm sans fingers) of grilled but bare breast/thigh on top of her rice, accompanied by some shredded iceberg lettuce and carrots. No shredded pork or other accompaniments typical of other Viet restaurants. A small bowl of stock soup came with her rice.

All in all, a disappointing experience lacking value and quality. The consolation is the restaurant is appointed above-average compared to most other pho restaurants.

Again thanks!

Great place for pho – one of my favourites.

Intriguing, re the sourness… perhaps it will be familiar to us because Philippine cuisine has a lot of sourness.

Hehe, I think I need to be re-trained in terms of eating hot things. I don’t eat the chili by itself as is, but I’ll add thin slices to the food… so I get small doses of it at a time.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Vietnamese cilantro before. And oh, I didn’t know it’s the same as “laksa leaf”… because I’ve seen laksa leaf in some recipes, but I didn’t know what it was!