Meryl Lawton

Fast Food Doesn't Need To Be In A Box | Vermicelli bowls are the staple of a quick, tasty Vietnamese lunch.

Lemongrass Café
10417-51st Ave., 413-0088

Force of habit leads me to think of Vietnamese cuisine as fast food — not in the greasy, degenerate, mass-produced, nutrition-free sense of the term, but as an inexpensive, convenient meal-in-a-bowl.

As such, my tendency has been to judge Vietnamese places on the strength of their vermicelli and compare them to the venerable Pagolac, the agreeably down-market Viet restaurant on 97th Street where I first learned to love the combination of skinny rice noodles, grilled meats (including the enigmatic hamball, that salty, boneless orb of processed pig the colour of a pencil eraser), spring rolls, fresh herbs and vegetables, and a crowning douse of fish sauce. Just thinking of No. 57 on their menu is like Pavlov’s storied bell to my gustatory apparatus.

Vietnamese cuisine certainly finds higher forms of expression than the lowly noodle house, but few restaurants in our fair city have hit upon the right formula.

They may be more aesthetically appealing, but the food lacks the magical gestalt of a well-composed bowl of bun or pho. And I’ve found the extra expense of eating at such places tends to have more to do with the pretty décor than a commensurate improvement in flavour.

It was on these grounds that I wrote off Lemongrass Café the one time that I ate there when it opened more than a decade ago. It was adorned and lit more tastefully than Chinatown’s pho outlets, perhaps generically so, but their vermicelli fell short of the Pagolac gold standard. Somehow it was just too ... I don’t know ... clean. Clearly this opinion needed to be updated.

The Lemongrass Café is still boasts a pleasant dining room with tasteful, quasi-exotic art photography and an open display of its beer and wine selection by way of decoration.

The fresh-faced server who seated us exuded nervous excitement at the prospect of attending to us. His suggestions about what to try were so copious — as was the menu — that it took us longer than usual to nail down our selections, but we eventually settled on green papaya salad with beef ($7) and grilled mussels ($8) to start, followed by the intriguing chicken with mango and apple in red curry ($13) with rice ($3) and, yes, vermicelli with lemongrass prawns, chicken, and beef ($11.50).

Those familiar with the Thai variant on green papaya salad are accustomed to a spicy, pungent attack on the tastebuds studded with dried shrimp and spiked with enough heat to paint your eyelids with sweat at first bite.

The Lemongrass Café version is decidedly gentler — the usual matchsticks of papaya and carrot in this case were tossed with rice vinegar and a bit of chili paste, then topped with chopped fresh basil and slips of grilled marinated beef. It was a refreshing, crunchy little palate-cleanser and a nice complement to the eight chewy, toothsome grilled mussels on the half shell, garnished with chopped peanuts and green onions.

For folks who like seafood but find steamed mussels a little too slimy to stomach, grilling them gives them a more substantial texture and, in one of life’s great mysteries, the addition of fish sauce makes them taste less fishy.

Soon the entrées arrived, and the news was good. First off, the dish of chicken and cooked fruit, coated in a coconut milk-based red curry, was a delightful surprise.

The chicken was tender, the mango firm and slightly tart, but it was the apples (Gala, I think) that really took me aback, blending so perfectly with the sweet, creamy, spicy curry sauce. This is a dish I would order again, and probably try to approximate in my own kitchen sometime.

The bowl of vermicelli was heaped with a generous portion of stirfried peppers and onions, chicken, and beef in an aromatic sauce of lemongrass and soy, and filled out with lettuce, carrots, cucumbers, sprouts, chopped nuts, and basil. My only complaint was that two smallish prawns seemed a little stingy in an otherwise abundant serving.

We managed to hold off devouring the entire plate of chicken, dreaming of a delicious leftover lunch the next day, and decided to pack the last space in our stomachs with dessert.

The sweets list was intriguing — deep-fried banana with Grand Marnier; balls of coconut ice cream filled with mango sherbet; Amaretto gelato. But something about the chocolate and pecan spring rolls ($4.50) captured our imaginations.

The pair of spring rolls came exactly as described, filled with pecan halves and chocolate and served with a caramel-ginger dipping sauce. We were glad the serving was small, because each crispy bit was intensely sweet, like several desserts compressed into a small tube, then dunked in liquefied dessert.