Second restaurant in Hue

Update: Back in Vietnam, in a Village west of Hanoi again. We had a good time in Thailand but I am glad to be back as Bangkok was so busy. We shopped till we dropped several times over the ten days we were there and I am happy to be back in the slower pace of Vietnam.

The second restaurant we went to in Hue was one of the many tourist restaurants in the the city that have a menu that includes some of the local Hue specialties. I was surprised that they made food as well as they did as they looked more set-up for making non-Vietnamese dishes for the tourists.

We started with a plate of salad rolls made with a fresh rice flour wrap, tasty with a nice texture provided by the fresh rice wrapper.

 

This was followed by a banana wrapped rice flour roll with ground pork and spices. It was very tasty but so think you had to scrape the mixture off the leaf; would have been better with more filling. And yes I did eat every bit of it as it was quite good.The cook should be proud of the taste if not the portion size.

We then had two squid based dishes, one with deep fried rice noodles and one stir fried with vegetables. The one with noodles had and interesting texture but the one with vegetables tasted better. It would have been better if the stir fry had been placed on top of the noodles. 

We next had a Vietnamese pancake much like what we have in the restaurant, the major difference was that it was not made with coconut milk which made their version not very tasty. It was very crunchy but lacked  richness that the coconut lends to the dish. The sauce was different than what we use at the restaurant it was not based on fish sauce rather it had a sesame seed flavour with garlic; not quite as nice as ours.

The next couple of dishes were not so great so I will just say that the deep fried egg plant was horrible and the Bo la lot had a grainy hard texture to the meat. Sorry to say there was nothing to learn from these two dishes so I will leave out the pictures.