Restaurant: Brodard Restaurant
Location: 16105 Brookhurst St. Fountain Valley, CA 92708. Phone number (657) 247-4401
Date: July 31, 2019
Cuisine: Vietnamese
Rating: Solid
Crawls are usually a lot of fun, and this super far, super extensive Garden Grove / Westminster Vietnamese Food crawl has been months in the planning. I collated several online lists of the best Vietnamese in Little Saigon and narrowed it down to 5 places (plus one coffee shop) and a list of their best dishes. I love Vietnamese food and have written up my full 2014 trip to Vietnam here. Bear in mind that 4 of us completed the entire crawl. Two joined for the 4 middle places.
We started furthest south at Brodard.
Their interior is fairly modern.
And they have a bunch of takeaway and bakery products. French influence in Vietnam I guess.
Vietnamese menus can be very long, and this is no exception.
Grilled Pork Spring Rolls (Nem Nuong Cuon). Heritage Berkshire grilled pork wrapped in rice paper with lettuce, cucumber, carrots, cilantro, chives, daikon and mint served with their house special sauce. These were a great spring roll, pretty much your typical “fresh” (soft, not fried) Vietnamese roll, except for the thick slab of amazing grilled pork. Really made the roll.
Jackfruit Salad (Goi Mit). Young jackfruit and steamed pork tossed with asian herbs, peanuts, shallots, and roasted sesame seeds, accompanied with rice crackers and mom tom (fermented shrimp sauce) dressing on the side. I was interested to get this because I hadn’t had it — can’t say I loved the weird sour and fish taste. It was edible certainly, but a bit odd.
Hue Style Beef Noodle Soup (Bun Bo Hue). A spicy and richly flavorful soup with rice vermicelli, tender beef shank, pork hock, and roasted shallots accompanied by asian herbs and bean sprouts. This was supposed to have liver, can’t say if it did. What it did have was PIG SNOUT. Really obvious snouty snouts. Pretty sketchy. Broth and noodles were great though.
Mixed up a bit to show off the noodles.
Overall, while I anticipated Brodard would be one of my favorites, it just turned out fine. Nice, modern, but I wasn’t blown away. Hard to tell though based on three dishes.
Restaurant: Quan Hop Restaurant
Location: 15640 Brookhurst St. Westminster, CA 92683. (714) 689-0555
Date: July 31, 2019
Cuisine: Vietnamese
Rating: Good
On to stop two, just down the street.
Clearly this wasn’t built as a Vietnamese restaurant originally.
The interior made me think it was once a sushi bar or something.
Another big menu.
Some riesling — they even charged us a little corkage!
Rice pancakes (banh beo). These were amazing. You put a little fish sauce on them and slurp ’em like an oyster. Really light, delicate, and exciting flavor.
Shaved filet mignon, stir-fried and tossed with finely shredded banana blossoms (goi bo). Very nice beef salad. Tangy with great textures.
Fried rice cakes topped with pork and shrimp dumplings (banh it ram). Extremely interesting carb on carb dish. Greasy (in a good way) rice cakes with, yeah, a dumpling on them. Kinda a bit breaded, but tasty.
Overall, All three of our dishes were great.
Restaurant: Song Long Restaurant
Location: 9361 Bolsa Ave, Ste 108. Westminster, CA 92683. (714) 775-3724
Date: July 31, 2019
Cuisine: Vietnamese
Rating: Old school, but amazing fish
I was wary of place number three, it felt too old school — but it turned out to be great.
Old school.
And not the most updated minimall.
Yeah baby, look at those curtains! This place has much more French influence.
Huge menu.
Rice crackers.
French bread.
Vietnamese style Chicken Wings (Canh Ga Chien Nuoc Mam). The wings were fine, very crispy, but that garlic butter sauce was to die for!
Sizzling fish (Cha Ca Thang Long). Catfish garnished with dill, onions, peanuts, served with pickles and greens and rice vermicelli.
The herbs and noodles. You pile it all together with the fish and add fish sauce. Absolutely amazing. 10/10 dish. Really really great fish with a lovely turmeric/dill flavor. Super addictive.
Overall, I was very pleasantly surprised by Song Long. Really by the fish dish — which as I had been told was worth the price of admission. Really fabulous. Garlic butter was crazy good too.
Restaurant: Banh Cuon Tay Ho 4
Location: 9822 Bolsa Ave Ste 101H. Westminster, CA 92683. (714) 531-5171
Date: July 31, 2019
Cuisine: Vietnamese
Rating: Very casual
Fourth place.
This has more the look of a lunch chain spot.
Interior is new, but bland.
Ice Tea? No, it’s a giant pitcher of fish sauce on the table!
Combo with wide rice noodles (banh cuon) and sweet potato and shrimp fritters (banh tom) and some liverwurst like meat. Interesting, and tasty enough with fish sauce. Almost the entire menu is various combos like this mostly including the same set of rotating items.
Beef noodles. You douse it in fish sauce and…
Mix it up. Surprisingly delicious.
Overall, this was my least favorite of the 5 places as it’s menu was so small (mostly version of the first dish). It would be okay for a quite cheap and tasty lunch by oneself.
Restaurant: Oc & Lau Restaurant
Location: 10130 Garden Grove Blvd, Garden Grove, CA 92843. (714) 636-2000
Date: July 31, 2019
Cuisine: Vietnamese
Rating: Great
I had high expectations for Oc & Lau too, as it was purported to be in the league of Garlic and Chives which we didn’t visit today, but I love.
The exterior, just down the block from Garlic and Chives — there are two locations.
Interior is.
Big menu.
Ruinart never sucks.
Frog legs (Ech Chien Bo). Fried frog legs. Excellent!
Fried quail (Chim Cut Rotti). Much like the Chinese style quail. Great!
Garlic butter queen clams (Nghieu Hoang Hau Chay Toi). Really tasty.
Creamy coconut periwinkle escargot (Oc Gao Dua). This sauce was a 10, rich with curry coconut flavor, but I messed up and got the tiny winkle snails which are impossible to eat. About 1 in 3 times you can pry one out (with some challenge) using the toothpick. Bummer. I just sucked the sauce.
Tamarind Lobster (Tom Hum Range Me). The sauce was too sweet — tangy sweet — but very sweet. Nice lobster though. We would have ordered with a different sauce.
Filet Mignon with udon (Bo Filet Xao Udon). Very tasty beef with onions and great thick udon noodles.
Weird purple yam and sticky milk free dessert.
Restaurant: Cafe Lu
Location: 636 S Harbor Blvd, Santa Ana, CA 92704. (714) 604-6347
Date: July 31, 2019
Cuisine: Coffee
Rating: Super weird
With just four of us left — and being very full — someone suggested we sample this oddity of the Orange County Vietnamese cultural scene:
Cafe Lu, a kind of bikini coffee bar.
Imagine a super divey bar where women in bathing suits and stripper heels serve you extremely over-priced Vietnamese coffee (or chicken wings). Very weird. Even weirder clientele. A certain hedonist managed to pound a giant coconut smoothy-shake (after our 5 restaurants) and THEN go to a huge Cantonese banquet in the SGV only 2 hours later. Woah!
In total summary, an amazing 4-5 hour journey through a California landscape not so often explored by the typical white-bread Los Angeles resident. One of the great things about our city (and I include the extended area we visited today) is the incredible wealth of culinary (and cultural) variety brought in by our vast immigrant populations. Keep ’em coming!
In terms of restaurant quality, none of these places blew me away quite as much as Garlic & Chives, but Oc & Lau is close and seems worthy of its own full meal visit.
