1613 Nanaimo Street, Vancouver
Tel: 604-251-1151
Web: n/a
Advice: If you are vegetarian this is not the restaurant for you. Cash only.
A group of my friends and I dined together recently, my friend Minna is Vietnamese and she chose the restaurant for us all. Personally I found the green decor to be a bit dated, however the food was as authentic as you would find in a Vietnamese restaurant in Vancouver. Some of us shared the dishes and others had their own. Minna guided us all thru the menu and explained how the dishes were prepared.
Lemongrass Chicken
Shrimp Salad Rolls
Bo La Lot in betel leaves
Bo La Lot - Sausages
Raw Beef in Hot Pot
Beef Pho
To begin our meal Alisha and I shared the Lemongrass Chicken ($6.25) with vermicielli, we also shared the tasty Shrimp Salad Rolls ($2.50 each) with peanut sauce. For our main dish Beef prepared 7 Ways ($25.95) I shared this with Alisha and Minna as it was quite a large dish, well it was actually 7 different dishes within the big dish and this was quite the experience. We received a plate of the condiments which included a large bowl of sweet fish sauce, crushed peanuts, dried lemongrass and sriracha with seeds, the plate of veggies included bean sprouts, cucumber, tomato, pickled daikon, carrots, lettuce, and mint leaves. Then we got a plate of Vermicelli and a package of rice wrappers along with a bowl of hot water to soak each of the rice wrappers to soften them for eating. The first course of the 7 was the Raw Beef which you don’t eat raw, it is for cooking in the hot pot of water on the portable burner which happened to be placed in the center of our table. The second course was the Bo La Lot – sausages wrapped in betel leaves which looked like green cigars, the third course were Bo La Lot – sausages wrapped in caul fat. The fourth couse was more Bo La Lot – sausages with an onion flavour. The fifth course was Grilled Beef over a bed of cabbage, onions and basil which is more like a salad. The sixth course was the Beef Congee which and the seventh course was a giant steamed beef Meatball made with mushrooms, vermicelli and onions.
Jay had the large Beef Pho and then Ajay shared some of the other dishes with Jay, and Alexei ate solo as he was eating vegetarian with great difficulty, the restaurant ended up making him a plate of rice topped with an egg. All of us thought the prices were very reasonable for the large amount of food served. Although we all wanted to have some dessert we decided that the limited number of desserts on the menu were not appealing and we went off to another place for dessert.
Review by: Richard Wolak
1613 Nanaimo Street, Vancouver