So after finishing our banh cuon at Thahn Xuan, I drove a couple blocks West along Kingsway to Truong Thanh (Foodosophy post here), where V’s mom regularly gets it from.
Look, banh cuon is proudly advertised on their sandwich board, and underneath, xoi, is what I later found out was sticky rice.
They aren’t open for dinner, closing early at 5pm. Banh cuon is meant for breakfast anyways, so I don’t see anything wrong with their hours.
Yay for English translations on their menu, I finally know what nhan and chay mean now, and so does V! Since I don’t think I’ve ever had pork cake, we ordered #17.
Turns out I have, as they’re the same thing just sliced differently as Thanh Xuan.
Something different was the addition of dried pork floss on top, along with the fried shallots. I liked it, it was hot, freshly prepared and had a lot more substance to it than Thanh Xuan.
It came with a side of pickled vegetables, which weren’t particularly pickled or sour. Just kind of preserved I guess.
Along with more herb salad, but this one had more (and bigger) mint leaves, and a lot more cilantro, stalks and leaves. I particularly like cilantro, but not so much to blog about it like this site, F*YEAHCILANTRO (Warning, language may be offensive!). I noticed something different about the mint leaves here, they had a lot of bite compared the ones at Thanh Xuan as it left a strong aftertaste and a little bit of a kick.
V felt like getting a drink, and I suggested she try a soursop smoothie since I wanted to steal some of it.
Still feeling hungry after finishing our plate (I was sharing it with V, so it wasn’t enough), I wanted to try the bun oc, the snail soup, but V didn’t want to share that since she doesn’t like snails.. so I decided to try something I’ve never tried before, #10. I picked it because I have no idea what water dropwort was. I asked our server what it was and he just told me it was a vegetable. Well…okay sure, that was helpful.
What it looks like. It’s definitely different. At first I thought they made a mistake on the menu and they meant water spinach, or kong xing cai, which Chowtimes has a recipe for here. Another post about it here. One bite and nope, it was completely different. The taste was really foreign to me, and the texture also was really weird.
A close up of the shrimp & fish cake and the leaf wrapped meat roll. I like how they don’t even say what kind of meat, it’s just meat. Tasted kind of fishy to me, so I’ll have to trust my taste buds on that. I was disappointed, this much soup and noodle and only one of each? The English translation was very literal then I guess. The soup was salty, and had a very strong fishy taste to it. In the previous picture, if you notice on the watewort, there’s a powdery substance. Think.. MSG or japanese fish stock powder. It was all that was left in the bottom of the bowl, and I didn’t finish it.
I would definitely go back again for the banh cuon, but I’m staying away from #10. I also want to try their xoi (sticky rice) dishes.
