{"id":13127,"date":"2011-10-14T21:58:21","date_gmt":"2011-10-15T03:58:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/travelswithmiranda.uskeba.ca\/?p=13127"},"modified":"2016-09-17T18:22:02","modified_gmt":"2016-09-17T15:22:02","slug":"thuan-hoa-vietnamese-restaurant-lethbridge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/thuan-hoa-vietnamese-restaurant-lethbridge\/","title":{"rendered":"Thuan Hoa Vietnamese Restaurant, Lethbridge"},"content":{"rendered":"

After work, I needed to get away from the apartment complex, so I decided to walk to a restaurant for dinner. I was in the mood for ‘exotic’ and decided to head over to a Vietnamese restaurant,\u00a0Thuan Hoa, near head office, about 1.5 km away. It just so happened that Jody’s daughter recommended it to me during Thanksgiving lunch<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I haven’t had Vietnamese in ages, maybe even since I left Ottawa. I used to meet a friend at a Vietnamese restaurant in the Hull sector of Gatineau on a regular basis, with my favourite dish being squid in a sweet and spicy black bean sauce served with tasty minty spring rolls. So tonight I looked forward to a wonderful, fragrant, tasty dinner.<\/p>\n

Well. There was nothing wrong with the food at Thuan Hoa Vietnamese Restaurant, but it was bland<\/em>! What?!<\/p>\n

I had the dinner combo 1A: two salad rolls, a spring roll, vermicelli, and pork, for $11.50. When I’d looked at the menu online<\/a>, it said I could add a bubble tea for $2.50, but I found out that was just for take out orders. The server let me have it for that price anyway since I had waited so patiently to order; I asked for a mango tea.<\/p>\n

The salad rolls were very pretty roll ups of rice paper, vermicelli, shrimp, cucumber, and lettuce served with a sweet peanut dipping sauce. Where was the Vietnamese mint?! Without the sauce, the rolls had great texture but no taste.<\/p>\n

Dinner came in a giant bowl. If I had known the portions were going to be so outrageous, I would have had only one roll and half the dinner and brought the rest home. Anyway, the dinner was a bed of vermicelli over which were a carroty over-cooked spring roll (at least there was sweet fish dipping sauce on the side), really tasty crispy pork, and more lettuce and cucumber. I had to drizzle peanut sauce over everything to get any real flavour.<\/p>\n

The mango bubble tea was a huge disappointment. It was the creamy kind that was pure sugar. The tapioca bubbles literally made my teeth hurt they were so sweet. I thought I’d had bad bubble tea before, but this was terrible! I didn’t even finish it. Next time I want a mango bubble tea, I’ll do like I did last time, and pay the $5 for a fresh juice one at Umi Sushi<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It would be grossly unfair of me to say that this was a terrible meal. Tea excepted, everything was fresh and beautifully prepared with generous portions. I just can’t get used to the way flavour is stripped out of cuisines out west<\/a> to suit the meat and potatoes palate of the population. The only thing I was pleased with was the pork. I’ve only just started to eat pork again and am finicky about grizzle, but this was cooked and seasoned perfectly. It’s just a shame that everything else was so plain.<\/p>\n

The restaurant is very popular and was super busy. I won’t be going back, but I can’t categorically not recommend it. It was really a case of the food not being right for me rather than the food not being right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After work, I needed to get away from the apartment complex, so I decided to walk to a restaurant for dinner. I was in the mood for ‘exotic’ and decided to head over to a Vietnamese restaurant,\u00a0Thuan Hoa, near head office, about 1.5 km away. It just so happened that Jody’s daughter recommended it to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1041,632,1226,635,5,3],"tags":[794],"class_list":["post-13127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alberta","category-canada","category-lethbridge","category-north-america","category-rving","category-travel","tag-restaurants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13127\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}