Simon says eat

After a very stressful day at work I couldn’t wait to get out of the office and go for a nice meal with my sister. This place is somewhere that she has been recommending that we go for a long time, she said that the vegetarian fried rice is the thing to get from the menu.

We started with a very refreshing drink at the queens over the road then wandered in to the restaurant. We were greeted by some of the friendliest staff that I have seen in a restaurant in a long while. They were really friendly and accommodating.

We chatted for a little bit and looked over the menu, the menu was full of yummy choices and from my experience of spending time with some Vietnamese families most of them were quite authentic. As I Simon would have chosen the slightly different options on the menu we decided that Sarah should choose and she chose well.

As we waited for our meals I paused to look around at the decor, it was decorated very brightly with a lot of fiber optic ornaments held up on the wall. Towards the end of our meal we noticed that the restaurant was a little bit crowded aswell as the chairs and tables are quite close together. While we were waiting for our meal we could see people browsing flowers at the florist next door. It was quite amusing seeing the different kinds of flowers people tend to choose.

There wasn’t too long a wait before the entrees arrived, I was actually in the gents when the entrees had arrived. Sarah was very accommodating of my food blogging and waited until I had returned to the table to I could snap some photos of the meal. This was a prawn paste wrapped in sugarcane. I have had this dish many times in Vietnam and it is always one of my favourites. Normally in Vietnam they grill the prawn paste over charcoal, however here it was simply deep-fried. While I thought that this was tasty I certainly did lack the smokyness that the charcoal imparts to the flavour.

All the service was quite quick. Our main courses didn’t come out long after the entrée and we started with the vegetarian fried rice. The rice was cooked perfectly and it had a couple of little interesting touches like the beans were sliced on the bias and there were little chunks of silken tofu mixed through the rice aswell. I wouldn’t go as far to say that its fantastic, however it was a very nice plate of fried rice.

We also ordered the pork belly and egg clay pot. When I saw this item on the menu I knew that this was a little sign that we were enjoying authentic Vietnamese food. This had chunks of pork belly that have been braised with eggs in a caramel and fish sauce. This was fantastic, slightly tart while being sweet.

The other dish that we ordered was the tamarind prawns. This is a dish that Sarah loved but I wasn’t such a huge fan of. The prawns were deep-fried then coated in a tamarind and honey sauce which I found overly sweet. My favourite part of the dish was biting on the little crunchy tails.

Sarah’s opinion of the restaurant was “That I much enjoyed it, I enjoyed the atmosphere and the food was delicious.”

I would go back to little Saigon. There are a few items on the menu that i would like to try, instead of getting the pork belly cooked in caramel sauce you can actually get the caramel sauce cooked with catfish. That sounds pretty good to me.