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2021-07-11
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Came here for dinner. Place was full and there was a line waiting outside. Looked promising.I have been to Vietnam a few times and do like the taste very much, and tend to avoid Vietnamese restaurants in Hong Kong because none I tried so far came close. May be the odd pho place. This is a Black Sheep group restaurant and their restaurants tend to be quite good. One is the New Punjab Club. So we had a reasonable level of expectation for Chom. To be on the safe side we ordered some of the signatur
I have been to Vietnam a few times and do like the taste very much, and tend to avoid Vietnamese restaurants in Hong Kong because none I tried so far came close. May be the odd pho place.
This is a Black Sheep group restaurant and their restaurants tend to be quite good. One is the New Punjab Club. So we had a reasonable level of expectation for Chom.
To be on the safe side we ordered some of the signature dishes (those with a red mark against it on the menu.)
However, as the evening wore on, nothing here tasted Vietnamese at all. To be fair they were mostly boring, not offensively bad. Except that one or two stood out to be exceedingly poor.
I doubt there were any Vietnamese among the kitchen staff, or at least the menu designer may not have been to Vietnam. If they think that people general don't know what they are eating, and the hip laid back atmosphere is all that matters, then they definitely got it right in Chom.
The crispy spring rolls were over dark but somehow managed to be not crispy. Not remembering what the menu said, it was impossible to tell what the filling was. The still wet lettuce used as a wrap made it worse.
The chicken wing weren't better or worse than a hundred other generic western diners.
The Kaffir Lime Chicken Cabbage salad was simply awful. It had a very small amount of hard fried bits that one cannot identify as chicken. It had no distinctive taste at all.
But the worst to come was the fish Cha Ca Hanoi. It was made of the usual low cost frozen sole fillet. But it is a piece of limp cooked fish that had no taste, on a bed of vermicelli, with a small amount of dill scattered around, and the whole thing sits on top of some insipid liquid, much like how an old wrecked car would sit on a pool of slimy motor oil that leaked out over time.
In Hanoi, the most famous place for Cha Ca is a hundred year old restaurant La Vong Cha Ca. In fact the street was named after it. Oil is heated in a pot at the table, with tumeric and a large quantity of dill, then cilantro, spring onion, peanuts and chili. A generous amount of deep fried fish cubes are cooked together in the pot. It is a landmark restaurant in Hanoi. What they call Cha CA at Chom is an annoying insult.
I had some hopes for the braised and shredded beef, having seen the beef on its own in the cooking area. But the dish came with the beef sitting on a very large quantity of vermicelli, and served wrapped in a large piece of wet and limp lettuce. The lettuce easily broke, and I had to wash my hands right afterwards. There was no hint of any characteristic Vietnamese herbs or spices. The beef was simply done a disservice.
It is a wonder why Hong Kong does not have better Vietnamese restaurants. The hundreds of pho places can be good, if they don't for some reason adulterate the clear broth served in Vietnam into a dark broth heavily scented with cloves. That is just not the way they serve it in Vietnam.
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