Le Viet Cafe and Restaurant .... Fantastic Authentic Vietnamese food discovered!

Good Pho (Vietnamese noodle soup) has been up on our list ever since we came back from Vietnam. Last week we had Pho from a restaurant in Joo Chiat Road that left us totally dissatisfied. Our subconscious minds have been dying for sort of a revenge to fight that loser feeling of eating lousy food and we chose to dine at Le Viet Cafe and Restaurant at East Coast Road. The small  restaurant is located among the little stretch of shophouses along East Coast Road nearer to Telok Kurau Road junction. If not for the bright red signboard with a distinct yellow star that caught our attention, we would have driven pass. Inside the restaurant, the decor was simple. Wooden tables and chairs lined the walls of the longish dining space. The walls were adorned with a couple of Vietnamese paintings and familiar Vietnamese lanterns that we almost bought from our Hanoi tour were hung around the restaurant.  Amidst our dinner, HY rap on the wooden table while I was lost to the world enjoying my bowl of Bun to catch my attention, reminded me that this is where she wants her Pho takeaway in future. Le Viet is truly up to standards and this includes it's reasonable price point. On top of that, good service.

We ordered a series of dishes to share and this vegetable dish was the first to come out of the kitchen. Never mind  that we'll prefer our vegetable to be served midway between our staples and meat, this simple looking stir fried lotus root with mixed vegetables was impressive enough for us to expect more from the rest of the dishes. It was lotus root slices were slightly sticky like it's supposed to be but it was crunchy. You can do no wrong with crunchiness out of stir fried lotus roots.

La Viet Platter (Bon Mon Khai Vi) Combination of crispy spring roll, fresh paper roll, sugarcane prawn & fishcake/steam roll. The platter featured the best of the Vietnamese appetizers available in the house. The fishcake/steam roll tasted like the the Chinese rice flour rolls. We all liked the fresh paper spring roll and the sugarcane prawn.

Yeah these sugarcane prawns are minced prawns made great by sticking around sugarcane sticks. The sweetness of the sugar cane got infused into the prawn. I chomped on the sugarcane playfully just to find out if it tasted better with the extra purge of cane sweetness.

This is a typical Vietnamese dish, Fresh Vietnamese Spring Rolls, that we come to know of even before we visited Vietnam. The prawn was the ingredient that gave it sweetness and the crunchy, refreshing mix of vegetables wrapped in the translucent rice flour paper wrap made this really awesome even without the dipping sauce (Nuoc Cham).

Vietnamese Vermicelli Dry - vermicelli w cucumber, carrot, onions, bean sprouts, peanut & fried shallots and sauce served with grilled chicken. There's options of grilled pork or crispy spring roll instead of grilled chicken. This dish reminisces of the bún that I had at Bún Bò Nam Bộ in Hanoi, Vietnam. Mix the ingredients with Nuoc Cham and then tuck in.

3-in-1 Mixed Noodles (Pho Bo Thap Cam 3-in-1) beef brisket, beef slices and beef balls with noodles served in beef soup. It was just last week that we ate a beef noodle soup from a Vietnamese restaurant along Joo Chiat and was aghast by just looking at the noodle. It looked more like kambing soup will the oil floating above the soup. Le Viet's beef soup is definitely not run-off-the-mill stuff. The soup was clear, delicious, light and appetizing. I was requested by HY to do takeaway from Le Viet if she wants Vietnamese Pho for dinner.

Egg Crepe  - Pork and Prawn (Banh Xeo) pan fried crepe with sliced pork, green bean, bean sprout, mushroom and onion served with lettuce. The egg was mixed with starch and wasn't as savory as we thought it would be. We didn't like this omelette. Half of these were left untouched. 

392 East Coast Road
Singapore
Tel: +65 6446 4567


Opening Hours:
Daily 11am~10pm