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Packed for lunch and dinner with foreign visitors, tourists, ex-pats and local Vietnamese, Nam Phuong, a Vietnamese restaurant situated in a large French villa on the northeast corner of Phan Chu Trinh and Ly Thuong Kiet, delivers both Northern and Southern cuisine, as well as traditional Vietnamese musicians nightly, with a sense of calm.
The lime green-washed interior provides a cool backdrop to comfortably spaced tables in rooms that spill into one another through wide, arched doorways. The high ceilings create an acoustically soft space, one ideal for a long lunch or a feast of a dinner, and perfect for light Vietnamese music.
Reservations are definitely recommended for this popular spot, as previous patrons include Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi, French President Jacques Chirac and Peruvian President Fujimori, among others. Request a table downstairs, as the upstairs is just as comfortable, but lacks the music.
The menu is not that disparate from other upscale Vietnamese restaurants around Ha Noi, but the quality of the dishes departs, especially the Nam Phuong deep-fried spring rolls (VND60,000), six of which are served on toothpicks sticking out of a pineapple with aromatic fish sauce for dipping. Also among the notable appetisers is the grilled shrimp paste on sugar cane (VND40,000), a Southern dish sometimes served with rice paper and other accoutrements for rolling fresh spring rolls, accompanied by a sweet sauce that absolutely demands a light Australian chardonnay. Check out the wine list, it’s actually stacked with good to great wines and well-priced, sometimes a really difficult thing to find in Ha Noi.
For mains, the simmered tuna with black bean sauce is a salty choice (VND70,000) – watch out, it may be a tactic to sell bottled water, as could be the simmered pork and shrimp in clay pot (VND60,000), perfect for high-metabolism sodium-cravers.
A stand-out is the sauteed beef with black pepper (VND80,000). The olfactory-engulfing addition of capsicum, a departure from other Hanoi versions, politely plays on the palette with the whole black pepper corns and the thinly sliced, lightly cooked beef. The fried softshell crab with tamarind sauce (VND80,000) is a step above most such dishes out there. Somehow, the shell is really what it claims to be, and the sweet fruit mixes well with the salt of the frying batter.
To top it all off, the banana fritter (VND25,000) and caramel custard (VND30,000) are recommended, and the complimentary green tea is a nice boost to avoid a food coma.
Having traditional Vietnamese musicians doesn’t quite mean always having Vietnamese music, as the theme track to the Godfather, Old Langsyne, and a few Appalachian American old-timey tunes made their way into the 7pm to 9pm (nightly) set. Nevertheless, the musicians are of high caliber and the Vietnamese portions of the bill are some of the most tasteful renditions around town
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