1117 South King St.
Honolulu HI 96814
808 597-8201
Thanks to a very nice review by Lesa in Honolulu Weekly, I tried out this new (two months-old) Vietnamese place a couple weeks go. Since then, I’ve been back two more times, and for what it’s worth, in my opinion, it deserves to be called Honolulu's best Vietnamese restaurant. While I can't say I'm in a position to definitively compare it to other Vietnamese places in the U.S., I have eaten at least several highly-touted places in San Jose and Westminster. I've can honestly say that food-wise, Bắc Nam really impressed me as much or more than any of them.
What makes it so special? It's both the breadth of the menu and the execution. About half of the items on would not be found on any of your standard Vietnamese-American restaurant menus. Nor is Bắc Nam a high-end, East-West, creative cuisine place like Slanted Door in San Francisco. Instead, it serves a wide range of Vietnamese home-style and mid-range restaurant cooking that generally isn't available elsewhere in this country, at fairly cheap price, in very plain surroundings. There are a plethora of lamb dishes, variations on hand-shaped filled rice flour dumplings, a fair number of simmered and braised dishes (how many of those would you see at your next-door Pho Peoria?), and Vietnamese curries with your choice of meat. Every unusual item that I've tried so far has been very good to excellent.
It's the kind of menu you want to eat your way through, dish by dish, over the course of several months. However, I'm not sure if I'll have the chance, since both times we visited there for dinner, there were no other customers present (the one time I went for lunch, there were about a half-dozen others there). So please go to this restaurant now, and as often as you can, so that they'll stay open and I can continue to eat there.
A short write-up for each dish, moving from appetizers, to meat dishes, to roll-ups, and finally to salads:
The "Bột Lọc delight'' consists of gooey rice-flour dumplings filled with boiled shrimp, raw yam, and bits of crisped onion and cilantro. Great texture contrast between the cover and filling, as well as between the mildness of the flavorings and the extremely spicy sauce served beside it.
The crisp onions seems to be a house trademark, since they comes on a lot of the dishes. I really like this, since it offers a texture contrast and a slight sweetness. If you don't agree, you can always ask them to leave it off.
This is deep fried “chả”, a pieces of finely-ground pork sausage seasoned with garlic and fish sauce.
Here are small cuttlefish (not calamari rings) that have been stuffed with a mixture of ground pork, long rice, onion, and cassava, breaded in coarse, jagged crumbs and deep fried. The squid are very chewy, so you end up partly sucking up the filling – but it’s very satisfying nonetheless.
Did I mention the lamb dishes? The grilled lamb ribs were the first thing we ordered (my son's choice), and they really strike you. It's not just the phenomenon of eating lamb at a Vietnamese restaurants - they are simply really good. You get several rib chops marinated in a garlicky, lemon-grassy marinade, and grilled until extremely crusty on the outside. You can see the crustiness from the picture, but not the way the marinade permeated throughout he meat. The meat is not ultra-tender prime, but it was tender enough, grilled medium rare (be clear how you want it cooked), and not dry at all. At $10.95, this is a dish you can eat all the time. . . The chops come with a ground-soybean based dipping sauce, which complements them well, but they chops are just as good eaten alone.
These “spicy grilled beef short ribs” are sort of like the Vietnamese version of kalbi. Not particularly spicy, just the usual fish sauce, garlic, and lemon grass marinade, but very well-prepared. Very crusty on the outside, but medium rare again on the inside.
This is called “Steamed Rice Flour Meat Rolls”, which gives you no clue at all. It consists of Bánh Cuốn, a kind of filled dumpling with ground pork, tree ear mushrooms, onions, mint, and other things, then topped with chả that has been steamed.
This is a rollup dish, so it comes with a rice-flour pads and a side salad consisting of romaine lettuce, mint, basil, sawtooth herb (ngò gai), and rau răm, as well as the additional salad of shredded lettuce, cucumbers, and bean sprouts you see in the picture. Another mark of their quality is that they go out of their way to provide the full range of Vietnamese side herbs, rather than just lettuce, mint, and basil. Ngò gai is a bitter, bracing herb, while rau răm is spicier, sort of like a cilantro / mint combination.
Grilled beef in lá lôt. This uses real lá lôt leaves (not grape leaves), and comes with rollup fixings similar to the ones that came with the bánh cuốn, as well as rice noodles and pickled carrot, daikon, and cucumbers. The grilling is perfect as usual – a nice char on the outside of the leaves, but not dry inside.
Young lotus root salad. Besides the roots (long, tender, stalks, not hole-filled slices that you get with the mature root), the salad comes with boiled shrimp and pork, cucumber, carrots, daikon, and mint.
By the way, just putting in the diacritical marks for Vietnamese (which I’m sure I did wrong anyway, since I’m totally ignorant) took up half the time of this review. I figured MS Word would allow you to input the symbols in Unicode but how wrong I was – not having much good sense I kept on going and finally discovered Vietpad - a fine Java bitcode application that I highly recommend.
Did I mention this place was unpretentious? It’s not exactly in the middle of a restaurant hotbed – it’s got a ceiling fan shop bordering it and one side and I’m not sure what on the other. Doesn’t matter go there – free parking in the back; great food.
