Month: March 2019

All the Vietnamese food under one roof: Nha Hang Ngon

I am adding this review more to showcase an interesting business than to praise the food. The food in this restaurant is pretty mediocre. Yet, it is an extremely popular restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City (and now also in Hanoi and even Berlin and Phnom Penh).

The idea is very simple: a restaurant serving traditional Vietnamese street food in a sanitized environment, with the possibility to see how the food is prepared. Tourists love it. This is the basic concept behind Nha Hang Ngon.

The visit

The restaurant is located in a colonial style villa with high ceilings on a very busy street (Pasteur). This review is based on a visit during Tet 2019 (at the beginning of February).

The menu is now amazingly extensive. They also have Korean, Thai, Japanese food (and I am probably forgetting a few cuisines).

Around the perimeter of the restaurant you can observer various “stations” where the dishes are prepared. However the order is taken at the table and many people do not even notice this feature of the restaurant.

I had a canh bun, a type of noodle soup with pork and shrimp paste, fried tofu puffs, and congealed blood (huyet). It comes with rice vermicelli. It was ok.

A friend of mine had a bowl of pho with beef.

Another friend had rice with chicken and a version of the canh chua, a soup with vegetables and fish originally from the Mekong region.

The check

The final check was around 500,000 VND (or 22 USD). For three people including iced teas and a juice, that’s a good price. Still three or four times the cost of these dishes from a bona fide street vendor.

I guess the price point is what keeps everyone happy: the owners have a large margin and the customers still feel that they have made a bargain. The food is mediocre, but not bad by any means. They know what they are doing. Up to you if this is the place for you.

Where in Ho Chi Minh City:
160 Pasteur Street, District 1

The Cajun Cua experience in Ho Chi Minh City

The Cajun Cua (“cua” means crab in Vietnamese) was probably the first restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City to offer cajun seafood. Cajun is both the name of a rustic cuisine in Louisiana and a spicy seasoning widely used in that cuisine. The Cajun Cua, like many similar restaurants, specializes in a specific aspect of this cuisine: serving boiled seafood (and other ingredients) in bags where it is mixed with certain seasonings.

The Cajun Cua has been around for at least a decade and in 2015-16 became very popular. As it happens in Vietnam, popularity was followed by imitation and other similar themed restaurants mushroomed in Ho Chi Minh City. In my visit in the summer 2019 the fad seemed to have faded away.

The visit

The restaurant is relatively small with a storefront squeezed among the shops of Ly Tu Trong street.

Ordering the main dish – the seafood by the bag – involved two steps: first I made my choices of seafood, then I chose the seasoning; I chose cajun, but other flavors were possible: garlic butter, lemon garlic, basil, juicy. I tried a few of these seasonings in the past and they are all good, full of flavor, but not to the point to kill the seafood taste entirely.

I was also provided a slice of lime to squeeze on a tablespoon of salt and pepper. This is a typical Vietnamese condiment, not related to Cajun cooking.

The preparation can take quite a while. I think I waited half an hour (that is a lot for a restaurant in Asia). But if you are smart, you can do like a group that arrived shortly after me and was served immediately: they had booked their food on the phone beforehand. The chalkboard above illustrates the waiting times.

Above you can see how my bag looked like: it included 250 grams of swimmer crab, 250 grams of green mussels, and 250 grams of prawns.

All the seafood was very good. The bag also came with a piece of corn and a mini slice of sausage (it would have been nice to have more, you can order extra though). I also had a baguette to dip in the leftover sauce after finishing the seafood.

Finally, I had a portion of chicken wings with cajun seasoning. Quite nice if you like spicy food.

The check

Final check was a little over 1,000,000 VND (or 44 USD). Probably there was enough food for two people with a normal appetite. While it is pricey as compared to standard Vietnamese food, you can enjoy some good seafood without breaking the bank.

I have never been in Louisiana and I cannot speak about the authenticity, but overall the experience and the quality of the food is good and it is a nice option for seafood-lovers.

Where in Ho Chi Minh City:
267 Lý Tự Trọng – District 1
(They also have a location in District 7, in Sunrice City, where I have never been.)

Dining with a cause: KOTO in Ho Chi Minh City

KOTO stands for “know one, teach one” and is the slogan of an Australian charity, founded by an Australian-Vietnamese, aimed at developing the skills of underprivileged and marginalized young individuals in Vietnam. They provide care and training programs for these individuals to make them employable in the hospitality sector. The centerpiece of this strategy is represented by two training restaurants, one in Hanoi and another in Ho Chi Minh City. Dining in these restaurants effectively supports this mission.

The visit

During Tet 2019 (the Vietnamese lunar new year and the following days) I had a dinner in their latest Ho Chi Minh City location, a nice old-style residential building at the margins of District 1.

The dinner started with a complimentary canape: a Chinese style fried wonton. The menu is based on Vietnamese food, but they also have some other Asian and Western classics.

I had their appetizer tasting platter that included deep fried Spring rolls, smoked eggplant salad on a rice and sesame cracker, steamed pork and snails, beef wrapped in betel leaves. It was a very tasty selection, easy to be shared between two people.

My main was a departure from Vietnamese food: a pan-fried barramundi on a bed of white beans and chorizo, plus fennel and orange salad. A very well executed dish that could have been in the menu of a five star restaurant.

Finally, I had space for a dessert: a pandan coconut brûlée, garnished with shortbread and grated coconut. It was a very good dessert.

The check

I spent 634,000 VND (or 27.5 USD) that I consider a very reasonable price. Especially the fish was very honestly priced.

The food was good, the environment was nice and the service friendly and attentive (as usual in Vietnam staff speaks at least a little bit of English). It is definitely a place that I would recommend for the food, even without mentioning their charitable mission.

Where in Ho Chi Minh City:
19 Nguyễn Đình Chiểu
Website: https://www.koto.com.au/koto-training-restaurants