with the recent opening of pho 26 on wujiang road, i think there’s a new solution for all of us pho deprived masses in shanghai.

pho 26, opened opposite the yet-to-be-opened krispy kreme is, at least to my taste, the best and most authentic pho place open yet in shanghai.

first we started with some deep fried spring rolls. super flavorful, crispy skin and a little bit of spice even. done very well. in fact, i’m kind of craving another order right now.

then the pho. let’s go over all the ways pho can fail – meat, broth, noodles. well, pho 26 hits all the right notes. the meat is high quality – i ordered the pho 26 special (or in chinese, the “train engine” special) which came with rare beef, cooked beef, beef balls, tripe and tendon. the portions were ample and each piece was quite good. the broth – it was the best part of the bowl. tasty, with enough meaty flavor. the noodles were firm with a pleasant texture and slurped up nicely.

so, it’s not an entirely positive review. for one, although i don’t want to sound like a cheap english teacher, 34 rmb for a bowl of pho is a bit dear – especially when in the us, $5 would get you a bowl twice as big, and in vietnam itself, pho is less than $1 us. also, they were very light on the pho preparation materials – the hot sauce, plum sauce, basil and extra bean sprouts just were not served and the waitresses seemed clueless to what we were referring to.

but the menu looked to have a good variety of vietnamese food, including vermicelli and rice plates. as much as i loved rice plates when i was in saigon last month, com was my favorite dish, so i’ll definitely be back to try out the rest of the menu.

pho 26
wujiang lu number 178, 2nd floor
phone: 021-52286597

price: about 50 rmb per person for lunch/dinner

my last dinner in vietnam was wasted (WASTED!) on yet another higher end vietnamese restaurant. next time i’m eating all street level food.

hoi an is a highly rated vietnamese place specializing in royal hue cuisine – what your author failed to realize is that royal hue cusine is basically chinese food. and really expensive chinese food at that.

the meal started out well with this really wonderful place setting and china.

one of the difficult things about ordering from a vietnamese or english menu, is that if it had had chinese, i would’ve been able to avoid some ordering mistakes – and ordered something a lot more vietnamese-y instead. but when i ordered vietnamese duck rolls, i ended up with the following:

it’s pretty much peking duck. but not as good. note the old school carved carrot. what anthony bourdain would call “dinosaur-style” chinese food.

the next dish was much better – and i think a lot more reflective of the south-east asian flavors of vietnam. grilled scallops

the last dish was honey grilled beef (savoring the grilled beef i had had at temple club the previous night) and while it was okay, it most certainly wasn’t worth the $11 USD i paid for it.

verdict – there’s nothing really wrong with the food at hoi an, but it’s quite overpriced and there’s certainly much better versions of chinese food to be had elsewhere, whether in vietnam or china itself.

hoi an
11 le thanh ton st., dist. 1, ho chi minh city
dinner for 1: $37 USD (yes! it was that expensive)

not because they went, but because of recommendations i went myself this last trip.

located across the street from an old chinese temple (hence the name) and above the best ice cream parlor in saigon (fanny’s) the temple club was an upscale vietnamese restaurant decorated to look like an old asia hand’s private club. old record players, ancient maps, comfortable couches and old rattan chairs and bar stools located around what looked like a place that maugham or noel coward might have drank some gin and tonics at 70- years ago.

the atmosphere and decoration was fantastic, but would the food add up? one of the issues with being one person traveling, is that it limits the amount of food one is able to try. even though i had just polished off another banh mi, but i still ordered three dishes.

i started with a grilled beef roll dish – and this was so fantastic. it made the entire meal worth it – the crispy outside contrasted with the rice rolls and the lettuce wraps. the smoke from the grill was perfect. i could’ve eaten twenty of these rolls.

the next dish was a miss. when i read the dish description, i decided, “huh, i love escargot and i love lemongrass,” but i found out, that what i really loved was garlic and butter and the smell of lemongrass as opposed to the actual taste. the snails were dry and chewy, while the lemongrass flavor didn’t contribute much.

the last dish was the recommended fish and it was . . . okay. one of the problems with “fancy” vietnamese food was that it ended up just being mediocre chinese food. much better to stick with street level vietnamese food, a lesson i would learn with my next dinner.

overall, the atmosphere and restaurant design (see photos below) made the temple club a great place for a drink and appetizer. and if every dish was like the beef, it would be a no-brainer recommendation. however, the two dishes that weren’t great plus the high prices (i spent 473,000 vdn – or $26.58 usd) make it only a luke-warm recommendation for dinner. unless you end up being a better orderer than i was. my recommendation – more vietnamese, less chinese in the ordering.

Temple Club
29-31 Ton That Thiep Street, Ho Chi Minh City
Viet Nam
+84 8 829 9244

here’s some more photos:

living in china, you get used to seeing one sort of style, so it’s kind of jarring to see another, asian country’s. here’s some i took in vietnam.

one of the interesting things i noticed, which is a large contrast to the way things were when i first started travelling extensively around south-east asia was the presence of other asians travelling around.

for example, when i took the tour to the cu chi tunnels – of the 25 or so people on the bus, a good 8-12 were from other parts of asia. thailand, malaysia, singapore, taiwan . . . and me. one of the interesting things is how english is used as a lingua franca amongst quite a few people who don’t speak english. so behind me the girl from malaysia was conversing with one of the thai women – both using english. which got me thinking how lucky it was that i was born and grew up in a country that has english as its first language. i think all those predictions and (fears?) about how chinese is going to take over the world as the dominant language is forgetting 1. how difficult it is to learn and 2. of everybody who is multi-lingual already, english as one of their languages, or at least it anecdotally.

this importance was underscored that night at dinner when i was seated next to a chinese couple from guangzhou. as they struggled with the english/vietnamese/french menu, i leaned over and helped them out with a few translations. they remarked about how difficult it was to travel without knowing more than a few words of english – and they marvelled at my ability to switch english/cantonese/mandarin – even though my everyday work conversation is a horrible melange and mish-mash of all three.

to distract you, here’s a photo of a huey helicoptor on the roof of the reunification palace.

first up was the museum of ho chi minh city. a bunch of half-hearted exhibits which were poorly maintained in a falling apart building. however, one of the interesting things was that there were at least 10 couples there taking wedding photos. i thought the wedding photos were more interesting so i trained my camera on them instead.

the vietnam history museum – located out by the ho chi minh city zoo – was so uninteresting (even the strange architecture) so instead i had some ice cream and coffee.

from there it was to an expensive and only average dinner. today is a travel day – first to hong kong for dinner, then onwards to taipei and back to work.

so long ho chi minh city, it’s been a lot of fun. now i’m going to go out and get my last banh mi before i head out of here.

C?m t?m in Vietnamese is cooked rice from fractured rice grains. T?m refers to the broken rice grains while c?m refers to cooked rice.

It is usually served with grilled pork (either ribs or shredded) plus a Vietnamese dish called bì (thinly shredded pork mixed with cooked and thinly shredded pork skin) over broken rice. The rice and meat are served with various greens and pickled vegetables, along with a prawn paste cake, tr?ng h?p (baked egg), and grilled prawns. Typically restaurants will serve this popular combination rice plate with a small bowl of n??c ch?m, as well as a small bowl of soup broth (canh) with garlic chives (to cleanse the throat).

in continuing my trend of eating what is essentially street food in gussied up tiny chain restaurants, for lunch yesterday i went to com tam moc.

nice interior design

here’s my com tam. really nice flavor with the pork and the broken rice – i actually like the texture.

to top it off, they had ice cream from fanny’s. the mint chocolate and vanilla

com tam moc
48 le thanh ton
district 1
ho chi minh city
pork special, soda chanh and 2 scoops of ice cream from fanny’s – 79,000 dong (about $4.43 – kind of expensive – but more than half the cost was the ice cream)

contains: carbonated water, sugar, acidity regulator, citric acid, natural & synthentic flavors, natural caramel color, preservative, sodium benzoate

taste: almost exactly like sarsae – for those of you unfamilar, its a sasparilla type, a little bit less sweet than a root beer, but in the root beer family.

the tunnels were pretty intense.

they let us shoot some automatic weapons. “today i didn’t need to use my ak . . .gotta say it was a good day”

for the tourists (that’s me) they widened the tunnels and added lights. even then, i didn’t make it the full way with the heat.

it was a pretty intense day.