Sao Nam Fine Vietnamese Cuisine is the very first Vietnamese restaurant that I have been to. It is not that I don’t like their food, but there are not many Vietnamese restaurants around. Oh well, it’s an excuse. The truth is that it didn’t really cross my mind to go for Vietnamese food whenever we are out there searching for good food.
Not knowing what to order, we picked some of the good-looking and recommended items by the chef on the menu. We ordered the seasonal Mangosteen and Prawn Salad for RM32.00. According to it’s menu, this is an award winning dish and an extraordinary and truly unique combination of the fruit of the mangosteen, dried squid flown in from Vietnam, grated fresh coconut, chicken slices topped with fresh tiger prawns, peanuts and sesame seed. The dressing on this mangosteen and prawn salad is Chef Tien’s special kumquat dressing. The combination of the mangosteen and the prawns when mixed with the kumquat dressing really goes very well together. Yummy!
The next item that caught our attention is Sao Nam’s Deep Fried Chicken Spring Rolls @ RM18.00. It is basically fried minced chicken rolls with strips of carrot, yam, wood ear mushrooms delicately rolled in fine paper and deep fried to a golden crisp. The filings in these rolls are really compact, so it is not as crispy as the Chinese version of fried popiah. Given the options between the two versions, I’ll definitely go for the Vietnamese one.
For lunch, I ordered the Vietnamese Laksa @ RM18.00. The taste, the texture, everything, is very different from our Malaysian laksa. This Vietnamese laksa is a super-rich noodle laksa cooked with fragrant curry powder and dried shrimps. The sauce was sweet and very creamy. Lots of fresh prawns too. Very recommended.
Beef noodle soup (Beef Pho) is also a must order here because Vietnamese are very popular with their beef soup noodles. Priced at RM18.00, this bowl is jammed packed with lots of beef slices. Yeah, you can’t see much from my picture here because it was all placed at the bottom of the bowl. And by the way, they gave lots of soup too which was another reason why I like this dish.
As for drinks, without a second thought, we ordered their Premium Coffee – Bazan (a triple ‘A’ grade Vietnamese Arabica) and Dak Lak (also a Vietnamese Arabica minus the triple ‘A’ – French mocha) @ RM15.00 each. Nothing fancy though. It tasted okay. What are the difference between the triple ‘A’ grade and the normal grade? I think that the triple ‘A’ grade is much smoother, while the normal grade is slightly sourish.
