Family serves up flavorful Vietnamese dishes
By Matthew Gray
Advertiser Restaurant Critic
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| Dishes at Julie & Hoang's Café include a chicken salad, right, and summer rolls, which are stuffed with rice noodles, shrimp and pork loin and served with a creamy peanut dipping sauce. Although the restaurant's menu is quite limited, the food is tasty.
Jeff Widener • The Honolulu Advertiser Julie & Hoang's Café 1502 Liliha St. 521-3545 10 a.m.-8:30 p.m. daily
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The interior is less than minimalist. It's stark, small and bright. This qualifies as a genuine hole-in-the-wall.
Spring rolls ($2.85 for two, $5 for four) are filled with a juicy blend of pork and chicken, served with cool, crisp leaves of romaine, fresh mint, wedges of crunchy cucumber and a light sweet-tart dipping sauce, making this a pleasant starter. Summer rolls ($3 for two) are tightly bound rice wrappers stuffed with rice noodles, shrimp and pork loin, served with a creamy peanut dipping sauce.
I devoured the lemon salad ($5) that combines romaine with tomato, mint and lots of thinly sliced onion in a tangy lemony marinade, sprinkled with roasted peanuts. You can choose chicken or beef on this salad.
Vietnamese cuisine is special because of its rich Southeast Asia history, and perhaps more so because of the culinary influence of France, a former colonial power.
Vietnamese cooks have referred to their food as "the nouvelle cuisine of Asia." And, indeed, with the heavy reliance on rice, abundance of fresh herbs and vegetables, minimal use of oil and treatment of meat as a condiment rather than a main course, Vietnamese food has to be among the the most healthful on the planet.
Vietnamese cooking possesses a particular fondness for beef. Stir-frying plays a relatively minor role, as does frying, but techniques such as simmering and grilling seem to lead the way in their kitchens.
There is a smaller variety of phô (noodle soups) here than at many other Vietnamese eateries I have visited.
Phô is the national dish of Vietnam, beginning with the boiling of beef shinbones until a rich gelatinous consommé is created. This takes about 24 hours. The broth and noodles are then flavored with a delicate balance of herbs and spices.
When you place your order for the special combination beef phô ($5.50), you will receive slices of beef, tripe, tendon, meatballs and brisket on top of rice noodles in a bowl of broth sprinkled with herbs, sliced onion and fresh aromatics. Other phô types include a chicken noodle soup ($5.25, but unless you're Vietnamese, this is not your mama's chicken noodle soup, my friends) and a seafood noodle soup for $5.50. Tuck in that napkin and be prepared for serious slurping.
The cold rice vermicelli noodle dishes (called bun) is a meal in a bowl, with your choice of toppings (usually meat items such as barbecued chicken, grilled or shredded pork, and even spring rolls) served over a mountain of cool white rice, vermicelli noodles with fresh basil, mint, cucumber and bean sprouts. All this for $5.25 to $5.50.
The most popular part of the menu are rice plates (com dia in Vietnamese) served with salad and rice. Ginger soy-sauce chicken ($5.25) displayed fine flavors but didn't contain enough ginger to give it a starring role in this dish.
The three curries (chicken, beef and shrimp, each $5.50) are saucy and spicy creations that contain carrot, onion and potato, with a flavor profile closer to a Chinese curry than Thai, Chinese, Indian or Japanese versions.
The barbecued pork chop ($5.25) is quite good here, thinly sliced and grilled just right, a bit salty and a bit spicy. Lemongrass chicken ($5.25) or shrimp ($5.50) could have had a more pronounced lemongrass flavor, but the soy-sauce garlic shrimp with green onion ($5.50) was quite good, with scads of small, tasty crustaceans on the plate.
Although the menu is quite limited, I enjoyed the food here. What it lacks in complexity and plate design (compared with other Vietnamese restaurants), it makes up for with an innocent desire to do well and very low prices. Leave your preconceptions at the door and have a flavorful and inexpensive meal.
Reach Matthew Gray at mgray@honoluluadvertiser.com.
