Flavor Boulevard

Tag: Lemon Grass

  • Second time at Lemon Grass

      We came back, and it was new. The menu is a laminated extensive list. The construction was finished. The booths are filled. The space was lushed with soothing 80’s music. The dishes were brought out one after another all too quickly.

      Appetizer 1: tôm chiên cốm (fried shrimp coated with crispy green rice, pictured above). Little seasoning is added, the flavor relies on the shrimps’ freshness and the cốm‘s natural confection. Pure novelty. The shrimps come in flock of five.

      Appetizer 2: mango salad. Here’s my guess: a squirt of lemon, a pinch of sugar, a half-ripe mango (to keep the crunchy but not so much the sour), a pinch of sesame seeds for colors, and again, five rosy boiled shrimps for protein. It’s refreshmunchtastic.

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    • Lemon Grass of San Jose

        The nice thing about Berkeley is it’s about an hour away from San Jose, where Little Saigon is with all the good old Vietnamese food. The sad thing is Berkeley is *cluttered*, no space for parking, hence it’s impractical to have a car, hence if you want to go to San Jose, you can either get on and off five buses for a decent cost and risk missing your stops, or get a zipcar and have to bite your nails over how many hours you should spend hunting for food at the expense of the car, or quickly get over 25 years of age and rent a car at the local Enterprise, Hertz, and the like. Or hope that a friend with a car likes you and Vietnamese food enough to make the drive.

        Because one Bánh Cuốn Tây Hồ mysteriously didn’t exist where Google Maps say it is, and another was closed, we ventured to Lemon Grass on Story Road for a Vietnamese lunch. It looks nice on the outside, and the inside too. I would go as far as saying this is how I’d like a Vietnamese restaurant to look, a notch above the common phở houses. Yelp’s reviewers don’t seem to approve of it, but arguably for the wrong reason. Yes, the service was slow, but the food was good. When rating a restaurant, food quality comes first. Just look how the lady immersed herself in the sensation of the hot pot.

        We ordered bánh cuốn hồ Tây and cơm sườn nướng (rice grilled pork chop). The bánh cuốn turned out to be no bánh cuốn…

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