Restaurant review – Griffith Vietnamese Restaurant
Rarely do I take the time to bother writing a review of a restaurant. I’ve made exception on occasion, usually for an exceptionally great dining experience. Tonight, unfortunately that is not the case.
My wife was tempted by a couple of positive reviews of this place on Yelp. This was our first mistake. She put in her selection for a dish, I added a couple of my own, and I ordered takeaway. Asked for it to be ready at 6, I turned up early at about 5:50 and it was already ready and sitting on a bench. Not particularly fresh I suppose, but these are first world problems.
Anyway, to the food. Arrived home in short order and served it all up. We had ordered the following:
Vietnamese spring rolls
Beef in black bean sauce
Chicken with Vietnamese mint, peanut and onion
Pork braised with black pepper in our own sauce and onion
Special fried rice
It was, in a word, awful. In some more words, it was literally the word Asian food that I’ve eaten, and that includes Maggi Two Minute Noodles (low salt chicken flavour). As the pictures will attest, every dish looked exactly the same. Meat, onion, carrot, cabbage. The rice looked pale yellow and contained a few peas with some chopped up sliced ham – the sort of ham you’d find in a kid’s school lunch sandwich. There were no greens whatsoever. None. Just the carrot, onion and cabbage in each.
We plated up to our two little boys and ourselves and got cracking. The food tasted even worse than it looked. Completely and utterly bland, except for the taste of oil. The ‘mint’ dish did not appear to have mint in it. The beef in black bean contained no black beans, just oil. The pork contained no peanuts. Just oil. The rice lacked any flavour, and I mean to say that it didn’t even taste like boiled rice – it tasted of nothing at all.
The portion sizes were pretty tight too, barely half filled containers, but I’m prepared to accept that for very good quality over a poor quantity. Sadly, these dishes had neither quality nor quantity. I’m not sure what exactly is so Vietnamese about this place. It’s just generic, very bland Asian food. I really cannot recommend against this place enough.
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