Restaurant: Ben Thanh

Ben Thanh was alright. Is there any more boring way of starting a review? A praiseful review's lyrical prose can make you almost taste the food; a biting review can schadenfreudeistically mince up a place like an onion. Ben Thanh's not bad but not great either. The price's are also alright, in the $9 for an entree range. Alright, but again that's not a great price. To be fair to them, I enjoyed it a lot more the first time I went. When I went on Sunday I had the Saigon Chow Mein so it was probably my fault. I fell into the "spicy for white people" trap, where such restaurants list their mild stuff as medium and their medium stuff as hot. So it was too bland, plus the noodles were too eggy [you didn't like the fact that egg noodles were eggy?! --ed]. The broccoli was great though (though I'm a cheap date with broccoli, doesn't take much to make me like them). Plus, I was looking to go somewhere else but the two restaurants I checked were closed on Sundays (ick).


My parents both had leftovers – a noodle dish and a tofu dish – which they didn't want to cart back to Toronto. So I took them home and poured the tofu and the sauce into the noodles and – like magic! – turned it into a kind of soup. The soup was a lot better than my entree. The tofu was a bit rubbery, but the vegetables were good and it even had a bit of a kick to it. I even ate half of it cold because I like cold spicy things.



Actually just thinking about the soup made me change the name of this post from "Pho-Gettable" to the blander title it has now. The downside is that I might have locked myself in for the banal "Restaurant: [Restaurant's Name]" formula for restaurant reviews. But I don't want to knock it – I've enjoyed most of what I had there (over my two visits and the leftovers) and they have 2 pages of vegetarian options.

Ben Thanh
57 York Street London, Ontario