The traditional bánh xèo at vegetarian restaurant - Liên Hương

I just wrote my first preview on my probably first vegetarian meal at my old colleague's restaurant last week, and yesterday with him I decided to discover another place, famous for their vegetarian noodles and vegetarian "bánh xèo". Whenever I think about vegetarian cuisine, ingredients...I always limit myself within certain dishes that I really love like the deep fried tofu covered in chopped lemongrass or my all-time favourire pumpkin soup with banana, sweet potato, peanut cooked in very tasty coconut milk. I know there is a long list of vegetarian dishes but I didn't expect what we  tried yesterday at Liên Hương - their signature dish - "vegetarian bánh xèo".   

           Vegetarian bánh xèo - looks exactly the same, the dipping pineapple sauce was amazing! 

When we came here by our friend's recommendation, he asked us to try the noodles and the dessert soup (chè!) but then three of us - my old colleague who runs his own vegetarian place with his business parter and myself, we ended up with even more than 5 dishes: the noodles, the pancake, the salad, the green banana soup, the hotpot and the sweet! I still got a chance to take a photo of deep fried mushroom on another table.

             Our friend recommended this noodles "mỳ tiềm"- it was very good but it could be better! 

My colleague is going to launch the new noodles soup at his place, so we both ordered "mỳ tiềm" here, to compare with his recipe! It was yummy, but according to him and his business partner - they may add something more, to make it more attractive and tastier.

             The dip pineapple sauce - a bit sweet, a bit sour and flavourful, something new to me!

We ordered bánh xèo - actually I didn't expect a vegetarian bánh xèo as it's always with a lot of pork, shrimp...but then I realised it's so easy to replace the heavy fatty meat with a good collection of veggies: bean sprout, jicama, carrot, mixed with deep fried mushroom. But what surprised us most was the dipping sauce - it was beautiful yellow tasty pineapple sauce, a bit sweet, a bit sour and flavourful, it went very well with vegetarian bánh xèo.

           It was good but I would suggest to add some more ingredients...make it more tasty!  

           To wrap bánh xèo in leaf mustard was my habit, dip pineapple sauce was very good. 

Liên Hương vegetarian restaurant, according to their introduction in the menu, was created by a group of Traditional Medicine doctors, who want to offer a healthy way of living, they don't use monosodium, very little of sugar and mostly organic ingredients in their cooking. Upstair they have a studio to demonstrate the Vietnamese tea ceremony, I curiously wonder do we have this kind of tea ceremony as Japanese or Chinese ? I will find out later!
Anyway it's a very good idea, especially these days when the though of a plenty of the bad quality food, beverage in the market terrifies consumers more and more, we need a lot of places like this in Sài Gòn.  

          We didn't tried this deep fried mushroom, it was on another table. We'll try next time. 

           At the end we tried this dessert, it was good but we all were so full, so we couldn't enjoy it. 

We still had some other dishes but for this place, I would recommend you to try the bánh xèo, the noodles - to me it could be the signature dishes of Liên Hương's place.

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Nhà Hàng Trà Việt Liên Hương 149/31 A Lê Thị Riêng, P. Bến Thành, district 1, HCMC. 
Tel: 08 3925 0547 




http://www.vietstreetfood.com/2012/02/banh-xeo-vietnamese-pancake.html