Vietnam was our last family vacation abroad, just before the corona virus. A three-week journey, from the Chinese border in the north to the Mekong River delta in the south, full of breathtaking landscapes, magical cities and unimaginable culinary wealth. Chinese influences on one side and years of French colonialism on the other. The second, they create a combination of flavors and techniques that takes your taste buds to places you didn’t even know existed. The problem with such a successful experience is that even after three years, you don’t stop missing it.
And that’s a problem. Because unlike Thai cuisine, which was warmly embraced by Israelis, Vietnamese cuisine never really caught on in Tel Aviv. Although since there is you to us, the situation has improved, but the number of Vietnamese restaurants in the city can still be counted on one hand. In such cases you take what the universe gives you. Last week, when another wave of longing suddenly struck (it’s interesting what in the surrounding atmosphere at the moment makes a person dream of the farthest place he’s been), and we found ourselves completely by chance in the Rabin Square area, we understood that this was a hint, and we immediately sat down at the Hanoi Cafe.
It’s not Vietnam, even if it really wants to be. K-Fa Hanoi (photo: Public Relations)
The initial feeling when you walk in the door is that there is a gap between the effect they tried to create in the restaurant and what actually came out. Maybe maybe it’s just the red velvet curtain that tries to convey elegance but creates the effect of entering a tent that the kids built from sheets in the living room. Not that it matters. The best pho soup we had the chance to taste, we ate with an elderly woman, in the old city of Hanoy, in a small restaurant that looked (and smelled) like a motorcycle garage, sitting on plastic crates in front of a makeshift table. So with all due respect to the high ceiling and decor, let’s talk about the food.
We started with a palette of starters that ranged from successful to uninteresting. There was a summer roll, a rolled rice sheet with tofu vegetables and noodles, a dish that cannot be destroyed, but it is very difficult to make it more than just a bite, and here it doesn’t seem like they even tried. Seasoning? More flavors? something? is nothing. The only good thing to say about her was that she was more successful than the crispy tofu roll. And that’s just because without the vegetables, the tofu felt particularly lonely, even the limited crunchiness couldn’t help make up for the inconsistency.
The last part of the plate, the Asado Beef Ragu Steamed Baan, was the saving point of the plate (and probably of the entire evening). Which is a stretch, because in all three weeks in Vietnam we never once met a steamed bun, nor did anyone else meet a steamed bun, but in Tel Aviv it became a hallmark of Vietnamese cuisine. Who cares, it was very successful. I mean the bun is a steamed bun, I wouldn’t differentiate between handmade and a frozen product from the supermarket, but the meat was excellent, and the combination of textures worked perfectly. Really fun of a dish. What cannot be said about the steamed bun with “Asian shawarma” that we ordered in addition. Maybe because the name on the menu should have been “aggressive shawarma”. I have no idea what it was, curry powder or turmeric or some Chinese spice we haven’t heard of, but the result was so harsh that every bite felt like some kind of test of courage, and not in a good way.
. K-Fa Hanoi (photo: Public Relations)
The tuna tataki salad was a 180 degree change. Sorry, the tuna in the salad was a 180 degree change. It was wonderfully charred, delicious and slid down the throat with wonderful gentleness. The vegetables that were under it in the salad could not make the change together and stopped halfway. The combination between lettuce that was cut too big, pea pods, potatoes, fennel, broccoli and croutons was more of a mess and less of a salad. It wasn’t bad by any means, but there is no sauce in the world that could tie it all together into a coherent dish.
The pho soup was unfortunately more salad and less tuna. Only here the problem was not the mess, but rather the scarcity of the material. Pho is a soup that cooks for hours, creating literally layers of flavor that you can feel in every bite. None of this just happened here. Instead we got an incredibly flat soup, not to mention bland, that every now and then you could feel flavors in but before you even realized what was happening they dissolved and disappeared. And no, kashrut is not an excuse. You can make a successful pho soup even without pork and seafood. This soup is wrong.
The bo bon, a dish of cold noodles and vegetables with chicken in hot ginger, had the potential to be a good dish, but fell through due to a technical failure. The chicken was quite successful, the part about the temperature differences worked excellently, the only problem was that it was impossible to eat it, because the noodles, perhaps because they waited too long in the bowl, became a sticky mass to the extent that it was difficult to mix the dish and even more complicated to divide it into plates. Too bad. It really could have been successful. To try and console ourselves, we decided not to give up and took the meat version of the banh mi, the symbol of the French influence on Vietnamese street food, a sandwich in a baguette. And it was totally worth it. The baguette came with excellent strips of meat, aioli, pickles, cilantro and peanuts. It’s big. It is corrupt. It’s overkill and it’s great. It’s just a shame that the chips that were served next had the feeling of a frozen bag.
It should be said as simply as possible: this is not a good restaurant. K-Fa Hanoi (photo: Public Relations)
Desserts at a kosher meat restaurant are always kind of a question mark, so we did what Herschel’s dad does when he goes to Indian reservations and gambled. On the one hand, we got coconut yogurt ice cream with Nutella brownies, which was pleasantly surprising. The sourness of the yogurt, which was completely over the top on its own, balanced out the sweetness of the Nutella wonderfully, and the flavors of the coconut in the background were nice background music that gets you into the vibe.
Gambling, it is important to remember, also has another side. And we got it in the form of cold mango soup with tapioca. So let’s put aside for a second the fact that if you write on the menu that you serve black tapioca, it’s a bit strange that the tapioca you get is white, because it’s a miniaturization, and because there are bigger problems. Like for example the “soup” feels like it’s something that just came out of a frozen frigate box. It is not clear to me what this texture is, and where it appears in nature, and more than that – I have no desire to know. Just try and erase this unpleasant memory and never talk about it again.
Cafe Hanoi is not a good restaurant. It has successful exits and some good dishes, but by Tel Aviv standards it’s really not enough. It’s not that there aren’t good dishes here, and it could be that for kosher keepers, whose supply is limited, this could be a nice option, but the bottom line is that this is a place whose culinary highlight is a steamed bun and a baguette sandwich. Which is legitimate for a market stall, but a bit problematic for a restaurant.
2.5 stars, 3 domes. K-pe Hanoy, Kings of Israel 3
Schring 98 plate
72 tuna tataki
Bau Shawarma 52
Pho soup 74
Ban Mi 82
Bau Bon 74
Mango soup 42
Nutella ice cream 42