Hue Cuisine at Dong Pho Quan Hue Restaurant

 

Is it possible to get sick of caramel chicken? I’m doubtful, but I gave it a rest for a day in Ho Chi Minh City to find out more about Hue cuisine at Dong Pho Quan Hue restaurant.

Located next door to mine and Anthony Bourdain’s favourite rice-throwing restaurant, Com Nieu Sai Gon, in District 3, Dong Pho Quan Hue specializes in the refined royal cuisine from the centre of Vietnam that differs pretty dramatically from other Vietnamese cuisine.

I started with the steamed rice mini discs with shrimp and sweet fish sauce. You loosen the discs from the little saucers with your spoon and spoon a little sauce on top. Then optionally add a slice of light green chili pepper, which wasn’t bitter like I expected. The texture was perfect. Not overcooked, but soft and warm, like the perfect mochi, with crunch on top and sweet saltiness. Perfect.

I also tried a few bites of the pork terrine board. I’m not sure how they make these terrines, but it’s not in the traditional French way. Instead, the texture is more like a steamed fish cake, with air bubbles in the snappy texture. There was one like a mortadella with rich lines of fat, but the others were more blended and uni-textural. Very unique, and in my opinion not so delicious, but definitely worth trying. I avoided the raw slices of garlic.

Then two salads. Even though Hue cuisine is different, it still follows the same course progression of appetizer, salad, main (rice/meat or fish), and soup. And, of course, it’s still all shared. The pork salad was definitely enough to share. Mostly pork meat, it was dense, and lightened up only by sesame seeds, a little sweet basil and a fish sauce-based sweet and salty dressing. The crunch from the fried rice crackers contrasted the softness of the meat and other ingredients.

 

The pork was surprisingly similar to the young jackfruit salad. Same dressing, same other ingredients, same rice crackers, but with strands of jackfruit instead of pork. The funny thing is you wouldn’t know the difference.

 

 

Young jackfruit is incredibly bland compared to its mature, highly aromatic and sweet form. But that means it takes on other flavours well, the same way green papaya and green mango are treated as vegetables instead of fruit in salads and lettuce wraps. The texture of the fruit was a little different, but the fish sauce dressing infused it well, and there really is still a meaty texture similar to the pork. It’s just much lighter and vegetarian.

Next, the com hen, I think the name was—a traditional dish of clams on rice with clam broth. It’s simple and clean. You pour your preferred amount of broth on top to turn it into a quasi-soup. I find seafood stock very pungent, and this one was a bit too fishy and bitter for my tastes.

But that may have been because I’d already had a few bites of the best noodles I had in Sai Gon (which is definitely a brave assertion): the Tourane-style noodles were freshly-made linguine-like rice noodles (such flavour you never get with dried, or even the fresh ones from the market here!) coloured with turmeric in a pork broth with shrimp. It was rich but not oily, with soft but dense noodles, not acidic and not too sweet. Again, perfection in a dish.