Another Friday, another Asian food feast! This week we bundled in to the Yodler, my 85 Tercel, and headed down Jackson before settling on Thanh Vi, a Vietnamese place in the strip mall on the northwest corner of 12th and Jackson.
Bill is a pretty serious vegetarian, the conscious kind who doesn’t eat meat for political/conscience reasons – unlike me. I just lean that way and recently discovered that it happens to be four legged critters I don’t eat, but mostly because I just don’t like the meat. This matters because Bill likes to be sure he’s getting true veggie food, whereas I just don’t order anything with pork, beef, lamb, or bunnies. At Thanh Vi we had to scramble over a bit of a language barrier during the order, but our waitress was quickly replaced by a waiter who was a bit more fluent in vegetarianism and was able to suggest animal free substitutions, even.
We started with the crepes. There’s no possible way I could remember the name in Vietnamese, but I’ll be ordering these things again, maybe as an entire entree. The crepe is a big crispy oniony delight filled with tofu and bean sprouts, served with lots of greens to stuff in side and lettuce, maybe to roll the crepe up in to make for easier eating? It comes with a sweet dipping sauce – that’s the fish sauce that our waiter was good enough to replace with peanut sauce as a sub.
Bill had the hot and sour soup, which is nothing like a Chinese hot and sour soup, though it was marvelously sour and full of good sized pieces of veggies and tofu. This and the crepe alone would make a first rate meal. Nia had the chicken curry, which had just the right amount of spicy to give it a kick but not so flaming as to deter folks who don’t usually go for the fiery food. Julius had the shrimp and veggie stir fry – plenty of shrimp and the veggies were cooked just right. I had the lemon grass tofu, which wasn’t really much to write about but was just fine, really just fine. It was served with long skinny chow mein noodles that had a sweet and oily bbq sauce on them, not so much as to make the noodles greasy, just enough to add a bit more flavor.
Bill and Nia, who are ahead of Julius and I in the Jackson Street Crawl, said that the crepes stack up well against Saigon Bistro. I had nothing to compare them to and Julius said he thought they were too plain.
Thanh Vi filled right up while we were dining, lots of Asians, lots of gringos, everything coming out of the kitchen past our table looked appetizing and fresh. There are huge alpine landscapes on the wall, heaven knows why. The service was all right, nothing exceptional, but not bad. And once again, the tab for four people, with beers and tip, came out right around 15 dollars each. Thanh Vi definitely warrants a second visit.
Thanh Vi is at 1046 S. Jackson St.