Herald rating: * * * 1/2
Address: 40 Beach Road, City
Phone: 0800 SAIGONZ
Cuisine: Vietnamese
From the menu: Vietnamese crepes, $9.50. Beef pho, $9.50. Seafood noodle soup, $9.50. Lemongrass beef/pork/chicken on vermicelli, $9.50. Summer rolls, $7.
Vegetarian: Plenty - a number of the dishes come with vegetarian options.
Wine list: Unlicensed.
A couple of years ago at the Takapuna markets, I happened across a black and green caravan serving Vietnamese food, with an industrious woman called Ma Le behind the counter. The food was brilliant and she was enthusiastic: she was planning to open a restaurant and she gave me her card. I got very excited.
This is because her summer rolls were terrific. There is nothing like a good Vietnamese summer roll - ie. fresh, not deep fried. Ma Le's were light, with plenty of mint. Summer rolls are partly about how they look and partly about mint. They should be translucent. There should be a crunch from lettuce and the bean sprouts. They should be very tightly wrapped. The dipping sauce should be slightly sweet, slightly spicy, slightly salty or it should be thick and peanutty. And there should be mint. Mint is something many Vietnamese restaurants in this town somehow neglect to include in their food, but it's mint that makes Vietnamese food sing. Ma Le's were all of this and more.
So it was brilliant to see Saigonz finally open permanently a few weeks ago on a busy corner of Beach Rd. It's a small, smart, industrial sort of space: concrete walls, a polished concrete floor and a concrete bar. It has a big communal concrete table down one end, surrounded by bright square squishy stools; there are black and white shots of the Mekong Delta and Halong Bay on the walls. It's a great look, casual and contemporary: the only concession to some sort of Asian decor is a panel of bamboo in front of the bar.
Cleverly, the menu at Saigonz is short and sharp. Too often, Asian restaurants have massive menus with every variation you could possibly think of, but only a handful are actually worth eating. Saigonz has 13 and they're all done well.
Saigonz does a good takeaway trade; local office workers have already discovered the charms of Ma Le's summer rolls. Probably its only drawback is the plastic takeaway containers - this means they put everything together in the kitchen and then they stick a lid on it even though you're sitting in front of them.
One of the great delights of Vietnamese is that you add as you go, tweaking the chilli, the mint, the fish sauce, so it pays to ask for your sprouts and herbs on the side at Saigonz - they'll oblige you but really, they should work harder on this point. The communal table is great, so it's worth eating in and crockery would be nice.
But this matters little. Egregious use of plastic aside, when the food is this good and when nothing on the menu costs more than $9.50, you will want it in a plastic container so you can order a massive pile of food, some to eat piping hot now and some to take home. Which we did.
After the summer rolls, which are as good as they ever were, we ate ban xeo, which are Vietnamese pancakes. They're not really what you'd recognise as a pancake: they're crunchy, for a start; they come with lots of lettuce, lots of mint and they're filled with pork or prawns or chicken and beansprouts. They're oily and fatty and crunchy and sweet, all at the same time. You break them up with your chopsticks and then smush it around with lots of lettuce and herbs. The finest I've ever eaten was in a small town in the Mekong Delta, where a little restaurant only served ban xeo. They were twice the size of your head and I watched a little old lady across from us methodically work her way through one. I suspect the second finest I've eaten was at Saigonz.
Lemongrass beef, meanwhile, came on some lovely vermicelli and was expertly cooked; it could have done with a touch more lemongrass but it was fragrant and textured. And then there was pho.
Pho - beef noodle soup - is a heavenly thing. The key is in the stock: every chef's stock is different. It's best when it comes with a side of herbs, chilli and lime wedges so you can tweak the stock until it's just so. At Saigonz, as discussed, pho doesn't come with a side of herbs, which is a pity and there isn't any Vietnamese basil, which would make it utterly perfect. But the stock is magnificent: salty and beefy and slightly sweet, the beef is tender.
In fact, noodle soups are a strong point at Saigonz. The seafood noodle soup, which came with Vietnamese sausage and fish balls and a couple of prawns, had one of the best fish stocks I've tasted - it actually managed to outdo those from far more expensive restaurants. It was salty and seafoody with a lot of prawn and crab. It just goes to confirm what I got so excited about back at the Takapuna markets: Saigonz is a winner, and you should go.
