Saigon (revisited, revisited)

29 September 2021

 

SAIGON

Corner of Camp and Kloof Streets, Cape Town

 

I’ve not been to Vietnam, or Ho Chi Minh City for that matter, but I’ve been to Saigon often enough. I can’t think of another restaurant in this city that’s been as consistently excellent for as long as is the case with Saigon.  We’ve not had a bad meal here, ever.

 

Tonight, the wife and I met a colleague and ex-colleague (who’d never been to Saigon and arrived with high expectations, fuelled by our unreserved enthusiasm for the food) of hers for dinner, at 18h00 no less, almost as if we were still adhering to the ridiculous early curfews of a few months ago.  We had a good table against the windows, with a lovely view towards the mountain. Nowadays, the tables are spaced further apart than they used to be and this distancing enhances the ambience, as the fewer tables don’t create a sense of emptiness as is the case in some other establishments we’ve been to recently, yet one also doesn’t feel claustrophobic even when the joint is jumping like tonight. Saigon is always  crowded on any given night and this is another indication of how satisfactory it is to eat here, both for the food and the service. 

The only niggle of the evening was that the Singha beer offered on the menu wasn’t available. I drank a Stella Artois instead. The others shared two bottles of white wine.

 

The menu has changed over the years, both in type and number of dishes and the current iteration is bas one laminated double-sided sheet for the food and another one for drinks. It seems that many restaurants have truncated their menus  over the past 18 months and it’s not a bad thing at Saigon where the choice once was so huge that it was daunting and difficult to decide unless one simply ate the same dish all the time.  

 

The wife started with crispy chicken spring rolls

and ordered the Four-by-Four sushi combo and some pot stickers as main course.

The spring rolls were so generously portioned that she couldn’t finish her main course and took some of it home. We tend to over order when it comes to small plates and the type of starters Saigon offers because there is so much that’s scrumptious.

 

One of our companions started with crispy vegetarian spring rolls and chose a course of six vegetable crunchy rolls with a peanut butter sauce as the main. The latter was so much food, we took two of them home.  She was very happy with her choice.

 

The other companion had the cream cheese and spinach dumplings and the crispy duck spring rolls.  I tasted one of the  dumplings and it went down as smooth  as silk but tastier.  From previous experience I know that the duck spring rolls are life enhancing.

 

I was here for the absolutely unparalleled yumfest that is the pork belly and thought I’d start with a light salad, and avoid the rice or noodles, to give me plenty belly space for the belly. So, I ordered the woodear mushroom salad with cashew nuts, somehow expecting a side salad portion. What I got was a mountain of thinly julienned vegetables, leaves, mushrooms and probably 200g of cashews at the bottom of the plate.  The freshness was lovely and the portion was so generous I almost regretted ordering a main.

 

The pork belly is a large roulade in a deeply rich broth; it was succulent, tender and melt in the mouth awesome.  I’ve not been ecstatic about bellies I’ve eaten recently because pork belly dishes are like the box of chocolates Forest Gump’s mom used as metaphor and, if it’s now almost a standard on many restaurant menus, most kitchens can’t seem to do justice to the meat, either over cooking it or not supplying a sauce that would elevate the dish.  Whoever prepares the pork belly dish at Saigon gets it right, every single time. Where my default main course here used to be the Buddhist sweet potato curry (no longer on the menu), it’s the pork belly now and over the many occasions on which I’ve eaten it, the dish has been superb every damn time.

 

One of our companions also, on my recommendation, ate the pork belly too, with great joy and happiness, and I was humbly satisfied that my recommendations was so spot on.

 

My dessert was deep fried banana with ice cream. I prefer the Vietnamese flan (no longer on the menu) but the banana was  chewy on the outside and creamy on the inside and the ice cream was good. The wife had the delightful, creamy vanilla  ice cream and was well pleased.  

 

I can’t provide individual pricing, because we didn’t pay for our food, but the bill came to R2000,00 including tip.