It's always interesting to go to an "ethnic" restaurant in a country other than your own, although…read morethis one barely counts since it's in a heavily touristed outdoor food court right near Museum Island. From the outside, it definitely looks like any other mass-market Vietnamese restaurant with plentiful seating and a pixyish waitress buzzing around with her electronic order pad. But there is no doubt you are in Berlin and not Hanoi when it comes to the execution. Emphasis is placed heavily on heavy portions and the use of a knife and fork. Apparently I have the proper girth to eat here.
I ordered the Summer Rolls (Zwei vietnamesische Sommerrollen) for 3.90 Euros, which had the familiar cucumber slices, lettuce, cold noodles, and prawns with two dipping sauces, one peanut of course. They were good enough flavor-wise, but I was honestly surprised how haphazard the execution looked on the plate (see photo). The more interesting dish was my entree, the Crispy Duck with Mixed Vegetables in Peanut-Coconut Sauce (Kross gebackenes Entefleisch mit kurz gebratenen vitaminreichen Gemusestreifen, in einer Erdnuss-Kokosmilch SoBe gegart...geez, that's a mouthful) for 10.90 Euros.
Even though duck strikes me as more Chinese than Vietnamese, there was certainly plenty of it, nicely tender and sliced evenly. However, the idiosyncratic part of the dish was that it was prepared like a schnitzel with fried bread crumbs rather than the glazed roasting you would expect in a Chinese restaurant stateside (see photo). I'm not really complaining, just thought it was weirdly tasty and probably even more fattening than it had to be. But the other girthy customers didn't seem to mind as they were eating their Germanized Vietnamese dishes with gusto and a huge mug of Carlsberg.
FOOD - 4 stars...big, hearty Vietnamese dishes, the Bavarian way
AMBIANCE - 3 stars...nice spot for people watching on the outside, paper lanterns dominate the inside
SERVICE - 3 stars...the waitress moves like a roadrunner and speaks English with ease
TOTAL - 4 stars...East-meets-West seems to work here