Tasty Vietnamese lunch at Thanh Tòng in Eden Center, and how we chose to eat there
Some weeks ago when Abby and I were in DC to stay with my sister and her husband in order to see and help out with our new nephew, we took a trip to go to the Great Wall supermarket in Virginia to buy groceries for the household.
Eden Center
But on the way, we stopped at this place we found about called Eden Center that is unique all-Vietnamese shopping/dining center with over a hundred stores. We figured on just exploring a little, then eating lunch, before heading further out to Great Wall.
We didn’t feel like looking up reviews or anything to get a quick lunch. While we were wandering around, Abby ended up picking a place to eat. It was called “Thanh Tòng” (we don’t know any Vietnamese at all, by the way), and we ordered two items and they quickly arrived and we had a very filling lunch.
How did Abby choose where to eat, given the bewildering number of choices?
How we chose
There were quite a few restaurants in Eden Center that we saw as we were just walking around. In theory, we could have looked up reviews or looked at menu selections and prices to decide where to eat, but we didn’t.
Abby basically just saw this one little hole-in-the-wall place, remembered it, and we came back to it after looking for alternatives, and she said, “Let’s eat here.” I asked her why, and she noted that the place was small, there were only Vietnamese people (as opposed to “foreigners”) in there eating (and a reasonable number of them) and they looked happy.
[image: Store front] (Photo by Corbo E. from Eden Center web site)
That sounded like reasonable logic to me. I’ve applied similar logic in the past, when in an unfamiliar city looking for Chinese or Indian food. We’re not really interested in fancy furniture or elaborately purple-prosed menu items, just affordable and tasty “authentic” meals.
Abby’s choice worked out pretty well.
Lunch
[image: Menu board] (Photo by Corbo E. from Eden Center web site)
Salad
The salad was large and the main novelty for us was all the bamboo shoots that provided crunch and fiber. It was a filling, tasty salad that came topped with shrimp and a sweet, tangy dressing.
Soup
The soup had thick noodles and broth and was chock full of pork, shrimp, scallions, basil, etc. It was satisfying and I slurped down the rest of the broth after Abby was full already with her share.
Summary
The time-honored strategy of finding a decent place to eat by looking inside and seeing who’s eating and how fast the action is served us well when grabbing some Vietnamese lunch in Eden Center.
Correction: I did spot one non-Asian person in the restaurant the first time we walked by, but he was eating with an Asian friend, and he looked happy, so I thought that the food would be good for someone new to it.
We've lived here eleven years and haven't yet visited/eaten at Eden Center. We did try once early on, but the parking lot was completely full when we got there. After circling a few times, we went elsewhere. Since then, we've found other good Vietnamese restaurants and Asian markets closer to our house so haven't had the motivation to try again. Glad you found a good meal there (and parking) though.
We'd gone on a weekday, and not much was happening there then.
You did better than we did choosing a restaurant in New York Chinatown last summer. We had to make a sudden decision because we needed restrooms and weren't finding any that could be used without buying something, so the easiest way to access restrooms was to have dinner right away even though we weren't very hungry yet. We wanted to eat on Eldridge Street on principle (we were already exploring Eldridge Street at this point) so that narrowed it down. I think our final criterion for walking into this particular place was that it looked cleaner than some of the others.
It turned out that this restaurant was setting up for a wedding banquet in the main dining room. But we could sit downstairs, offered the English-speaking guy who was summoned by the seating hostess. (You know a restaurant serves mostly "real" Chinese people if the person assigned to greet customers doesn't speak English.) The basement dining room was small but had several tables of assorted sizes available...but he had us stand there while he rolled out a folding table from a closet and set up this round table large enough for 8 or 10 people for just the 3 of us; I don't know why.
The food was okay. Nothing especially delicious. The waiter had talked us into a particular dish he thought we would like, and I think it had mayonnaise in it?? It reminded me of the "Chicken in Gaijin Sauce" that the small Chinese Association in the town where I grew up would sell at the arts fest; the local yokels happily ate it, not realizing that the sauce was [choke] soy sauce mixed with fruit cocktail in heavy syrup, or that the name of the dish was making fun of them!
It was a very entertaining meal, though, because while we were there a party of 12 gathered in the basement to drink a lot of beer and sing karaoke in Chinese, which sounded a bit like drunken cats singing pop songs. They were laughing uproariously at each other, which made it funnier. And to set the party mood, the staff turned on the most garish multicolored LED chandelier imaginable.
So it worked out. But we had much better luck in Toronto Chinatown where we chose the only Vietnamese restaurant in sight--it happened to be really good, and cheap!
"Gaijin Sauce"?!?! That is just plain mean and cruel! I can't believe they did that.
I think it must be pretty rough being the 30 or so Chinese people in a mostly white small town in Oklahoma, and inwardly snickering at the people obtusely ordering "Gay Gin Sauce" was one of their few pleasures. They may have used that name only one year, though, out of fear that someone other than my parents (who had been to Japan, and who were friends with some of the Chinese families) would get the joke.