So I had known about this place for years. My mom's told me a long time ago because the owner is Vietnamese. Vietnamese gaining success seems to be interesting news in the Vietnamese community. Anyway, my dad was in town and we decided to try it out.
The first thing I noticed about this place when I got in was that there was no person to greet us at the door or show us to the table. We waited there looking like doofuses for a long period of time. When I say "long period of time" I mean in terms of being greeted and seated to a table. So -1 for that.
We were then seated at the table with no menus and no water. We had to wait for at least 5 minutes before either of these things came to us. Another -1.
The restaurant's decore was nice though. The image above is on the ceiling. I don't know what to call it, but it was interesting to look at. The image below is of flowers and they were real flowers. +1. One thing my dad noted was to check out the restroom. His theory is is that if their restrooms are clean, then their kitchen is likely clean too. Their restrooms were relatively clean. Nothing spectacular, but nothing you'd gawk at for being dirty.
Now comes the food. I forgot to take pictures of some of the stuff we ordered. We ordered bread and it came with some olive oil and olives soaked in with sun-dried tomatoes. Their bread was quite tasty. Nicely toasted and smelled good. For appetizers, we got ground pork stuffed calamari. This dish was very reminiscent of a Vietnamese dish. The other appetizer was crispy soft-shell crab. Another tasty dish. There was a nice spicy mayo sauce on top.
Here we have my main dish, duck. The duck wasn't super tender but it wasn't tough either. It had a good texture. I thought the things under my duck slices were potatoes, but it turned out to be pears. Quite surprising and the tastes mixed well together. The taste was again, very reminiscent of a Vietnamese dish that I've had before.
My dad ordered something that sounded strange: braised pork and deep fried egg. The braised pork isn't the strange part, the strange part was the deep fried egg. I had never heard of that before and neither has my dad. It tasted exactly how it sounds. Take a boiled egg and deep fry it. Done. As for his meat, it was pork belly, thịt ba chỉ, on rice. This pork belly is definitely a Vietnamese my mom has made before. My dad then tells me that that the rice is like something that the Vietnamese love, burnt rice. So they burn some of the rice to make it crispy.
I love tiramisu. So when I saw this in their display of cakes in the front, I knew I had to try it out. The "bowl" was made of chocolate that you could eat once you were done with the tiramisu. Personally, I like the lady fingers part of the tiramisu, the more of that, the better. This one had lot of cream on top and very little cake part. It was tasty, but for my preferences, it could have been better. The crème fraîche was very light, but it still tasted good. It definitely helped with eating the strawberries on the side because those strawberries were pretty sour.
All in all, the food was good but the service could have been better. The owner has balls though, making pretty traditional Vietnamese dishes into Westernized food and charging quite an amount for them. I'd give this place a 7/10 only because the service was so dissatisfying.
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