There’s an authentic Vietnamese restaurant in North York called Pho Com Vietnam that Evan and his lads frequent often.
The first time I went there with him was the day before we left for Florida, and I cannot lie, I didn’t have the best experience.
Evan told me he always gets the same noodle dish and never strays from it because the menu is extensive and kind of hard to decipher so sometimes you just don’t know what you’re going to get. Brotherman told me that one time he went there and ordered something random off the menu, and his soup came out with an entire pig’s foot on top of it. Evan suggested that I let him order for me as he knows the safe, pig’s foot-free dishes that are delicious, but I was stubborn and didn’t listen and I ordered the bun bo hue dac biet, a soup with pork, for myself.
Evan was very skeptical of my selection and was all “don’t say I didn’t warn you…” before my soup arrived. Probably I should have listened to him.
It’s not that the flavour wasn’t good… But I was surprised to see lunch meat in it. And not just any lunch meat, the lunch meat that includes other meat and vegetables.
You know the kind I mean.
Ughhhh no. I don’t get weird about food very often, but that stuff really creeps me out. I don’t know what it was doing in my soup, but I didn’t want Evan to be all “I told you so” gloaty-pants so I ate a piece of it anyway and said it was delicious. It wasn’t. So I ended up eating most of Evan’s noodle dish, which was much better.
This weekend Evan brought me back there to turn my experience around. With the promise that I would listen to his recommendation.
We started with sweet tea and beer.
Pretty good combination right there.
And for an appetizer we got the shrimp tempura, which you really can’t go wrong with ever.
And here is what Evan ordered for me.
The bun cha gio, thit nuong, chao tom. Or grilled pork, shrimp, spring rolls and vegetables on top of rice noodles. Big improvement over my weird lunch meat soup!
It’s served with fish sauce on the side, so you add that to the dish and mix it all up.
I went to smell the fish sauce before adding it to the dish (because I like to smell things) and Evan stopped me and said no, don’t smell it, just pour it on top. This time I listened to him, as maybe he knows what he’s talking about…
Anyway, I really, really liked this dish. The pork and the spring rolls were my favourite, but the shrimp was really interesting. It was kind of like ground shrimp and it was wrapped around a stick of sugar cane.
Much, much better experience this time, and my opinion of this place changed right around. I still do want to go back here and try different things, because a lot of the dishes on their menu do look really good. I think I will just need to ask more questions so I don’t end up with intestines or (shudder) tripe. No thanks.
What’s the weirdest dish you’ve ever gotten in a restaurant?
), so I don’t want to do a crappy version of it.
