Restaurant in Review: Ngự Bình Restaurant

Ngự Bình Restaurant

 

Address:

14072 Magnolia St
Westminster, CA 92683

Hello folks, I know you have been wondering if this guy is a straight vegan or vegetarian since I have been posting lots of meat free content. I do eat meat actually believe it or not. Anyway, today I will be reviewing Ngu Binh, a popular Vietnamese restaurant in Orange County, known for its beef noodle soup Hue style called, “Bún bò Huế” (pronounced like “boon-baw-way”). Bun bo Hue is similar to pho, a very popular noodle soup served all over the world with different variations. Bún bò Huế is known for its impacted level of spiciness, dominant amount of lemon grass flavors, and should assemble a balance of salty, savory, sweet, and sour. The word “bún” usually means noodles in Vietnamese; in this case, thick rice vermicelli noodles. “Bò” means beef, and “Huế” refers to the city this dish derives from and the cooking style. The beef noodle soup can be improvised to make it to your suiting such as spicy vs. non-spicy, vegetarian vs. traditional quality tender beef cuts, or experimenting with the flavors in the broth.

As a native and exposure to bun bo Hue, I know what to expect and how it should taste. My mom makes it numerous times, and I’ve been to many Vietnamese restaurants in the West Coast to try this particular and famous dish. Thus, why did I decide to go to Ngu Binh? Well, after being hammered by my cousins, relatives, and a few friends in Santa Ana, CA, I guess I “had” to go and try it myself.

Since I did not read the comments on Yelp or RoundTable, I was punished with a 90 minute wait time on a Saturday during lunch hour. Parking wasn’t fun either. Yay for me… I went with my mom and her friend to try this out. All I was thinking to myself, “this better worth the wait”. Playing musical tables at a Vietnamese restaurant seems to be annoying if it happened to me twice, but getting onto the food—that’s what I am here for!

There were other menu items, but really… the bun bo hue is really the only thing I wanted to try. I ordered non-spicy, of course, every Vietnamese person out there will look at you crazy and will make your soup mild spicy (the spice will build up, eventually). The traditional bun bo hue has the beef on the bone, but for the ease and hassle-free, the restaurant served the beef bone free. On several notes, I was really desolated when I found out that the beef shanks were not as tender and flavorful. The beef broth was diluted with water. Who wants to have water based soup? It probably explained why the soup was cheap by comparison to most places I’ve tried. The “thick” rice vermicelli noodles were under done, when that happens; the noodles tend to be sturdier, texture and taste are insufficient, and won’t sink down to your bowl. This was a major issue with me when I was trying to pick the noodles up with my plastic chopsticks. Luckily, there was a small side veggie plate to replace the unforgiving cooked noodles. The veggie plate had sliced banana flower (which is hard to find), Chinese parsley, bean sprouts, romaine lettuce, culantro (a stronger version of cilantro and looks like a GMOed leaf), lime wedges, basil, perilla (looks like purple-green mint), Vietnamese cilantro, and jalapeño peppers.

Despite the ups and downs at Ngu Binh, especially with their most widely known dish, the bun bo Hue, there were some executions that made the “bun bo Hue” more legitimate. I appreciated that there were some congealed pork blood cubes presented in the soup. Yes, congealed, it doesn’t sound nor fun to read, but if you did not know what it was at first, you would like it. It has a silky texture like soften tofu with a liver texture look which tastes very mild and subtle to beef liver. Oh, I also had a fish fillet addition to my bun bo hue which was sort of misleading since the traditional bun bo Hue does not contain fish of any kind, other than shrimp. Thanks to the addition of the extra veggies and banana flowers (which has a crunchy, fresh, and faint bitterness), complimented well with the lack of flavors from the broth.