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Five Vietnam restaurants among 101 best in Asia
The US-based food website Daily Meal continues its culinary tour
of the world with its first-ever roster of the 101 Best Restaurants in Asia,
which honours five Vietnamese restaurants.
A corner of the kitchen of Da Nang’s La Maison 1888. The restaurant placed
58th.– File photo
Ho Chi Minh City’s Lemongrass and Nha hang Ngon were ranked 21st and 28th
respectively while Da Nang’s La Maison 1888 placed 58th, Ho Chi Minh City’s Hoi
An and Mandarine, 71th and 95th in the list which includes restaurants in
Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore, the Republic of Korea, Sri
Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong and Macau.
While its simple wicker furniture and narrow three-story dining room may seem
pedestrian, the food at Lemongrass, located around the block from the city's
opera house, is not. The straightforward, well-cooked southern Vietnamese fare
(including an inexpensive three-course lunch special) represents the region's
fresh, bright, vividly flavored cuisine perfectly. Try the grilled beef salad
with mango or the chicken sautéed with chile and lemongrass.
Located across from the Reunification Hall, Nha hang Ngon is full of stalls
offering a multitude of examples of good Vietnamese street food. Both beef and
chicken pho, two takes on the national noodle soup dish in Vietnam, are
first-rate, as are the spring rolls, mango salad with prawn crackers, and fried
tofu with fermented shrimp dip.
At La Maison 1988, you’ll dine in an exquisite French setting inside Vietnam’s
Intercontinental Da Nang Sun Peninsula Resort. Under the helm of UK-based
Michelin three-star chef Michel Roux, La Maison 1888 offers haute French cuisine
with subtle Asian flavors. Expect to enjoy dishes like fillet of steamed bass
wrapped in a seaweed crust and pan-fried scallops served with a lime-scented
carrot purée. Designed after an antique French mansion, the restaurant’s
beautiful interior is worth the trip in itself. If the setting and your
delicious meal haven’t captivated you yet, be ready to swoon during your
post-dinner drinks out on the veranda of the restaurant’s Buffalo Bar, where
you’ll enjoy unique cocktails from their menu of aged whiskies and infused
vodkas.
Hoi An (its sister restaurant is Mandarine; see number 95) offers a
quintessential Vietnamese dining experience. Named after a central Vietnamese
coast town influenced by Chinese and French settlers, the romantic, cozy
French-Vietnamese dining room is a fitting setting for a menu of grilled shrimp
in banana leaf with lime juice and salt; tiny rice custards with crumbled
shrimp; fried chicken with lemon sauce; and cao lau - thin slices of pork,
shrimp, and sesame cake served on rice noodles - accompanied with marrow-bone
broth.
Mandarine, the sister property to Hoi An, which ranks 71 on our list, is an
intimate, romantic, and upscale Chinese restaurant populated with Chinese screen
paintings, wooden carvings, and live music. The menu is brimming with pricey
spicy, sour, and salty dishes that are the hallmark of Chinese cuisine. While
the menu includes delicacies like abalone, the foreign-friendly offerings also
include the more approachable grilled bay scallops with chopped scallions,
peanuts, and herbs, and beer-steamed crabs.
The dining options in Asia today are seemingly endless, from street carts to
night markets to cosmopolitan cafés to the domains of European and American
celebrity chefs. The Daily Meal chose Din Tai Fung, in Taipei, as the best
restaurant in Asia.
At Din Tai Fung, “what began as a mom-and-pop cooking-oil shop has evolved into
the home of what is arguably the world’s best xiao long bao, a type of steamed
bun filled with broth”.
Arguably the most dramatically changed culinary landscape is that of China,
which has the most restaurants on the list with 28, 21 of which are in Beijing,
learnt the Daily Meal. Four of the restaurants in its top ten are in Beijing.
The Daily Meal’s 101 best restaurants in Asia were voted by restaurant critics,
food and lifestyle writers, bloggers with wide restaurant-going experience and
long-term foreign residents on the basis of cuisine, style, value, and overall
buzz.
Source: Vietnam Plus |
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