Omnivore Atlanta

An inquiry from a reader:

Do you remember the name of the Vietnamese place on Piedmont near Rock Springs?  Must have been 15 years ago?  What place in town now do you think has the best Vietnamese?

Does anyone remember the name of the restaurant? Frankly, I don’t even remember one there. I do remember one at the corner of Cheshire Bridge and Lenox Road that I loved. I can’t recall its name either.

The best Vietnamese is at Com, Nam and Chateau de Saigon.

Bookmark to:

We took Wayne’s mom to Christmas dinner at Chateau de Saigon (4300 Buford Hwy., 404-929-0034) last night. I reviewed the restaurant a few months back and it was positively reviewed by Meridith Ford Goldman of the AJC recently.

The restaurant was doing a brisk business, with a large number of people apparently deciding against turkey in favor of banh trang cuon, the work-intensive dish that requires diners to make their own rice-paper wraps with a selection of ingredients. Wayne’s mom and I demurred on the ordeal, but he ordered the version that includes lemongrass-flavored beef wrapped in wild betal leaves.

We started with the apple-green mango salad with grilled shrimp and roated peanuts (above), probably my favorite dish of the evening, and some fried shrimp with a lividly colored but better-than-average sweet sauce. I settled for a traditional bun dish with roasted pork, shrimp and tofu over vermicelli. Wayne’s mom ordered the delicious shaken beef.

If you haven’t made it here yet, visiting belongs on your list of New Year’s culinary resolutions. Speaking of New Year’s, Chateau de Saigon now has a beer and wine license.

(Photo by Cliff Bostock)

Bookmark to:

Vietnamese cuisine is my favorite. I could eat it every day and I’ve been in perpetual mourning since the closing of Bien Thuy, although I like Com very much too.

But Chateau de Saigon (4300 Buford Hwy., 404-929-0034), open only a week, sets a new standard for our city. I’ve eaten there twice already and I’ve barely dented its enormous menu. The chef here grew up with Chinese and Vietnamese parents, speaks both languages and cooks both cuisines. The staff here, including the owner, seems to mainly be American-born Vietnamese, so you’ll get a much more thorough explanation of the dishes here than you do at the usual Vietnamese cafe.

At one dinner, we started with two appetizers unique to this restaurant (top photo). One was strips of spicy pork and a pencil-thin, crispy roll wrapped in rice paper with mint, cucumber and lettuce. The other (foreground of the picture) was ground shrimp fried in a tofu wrapper.

One entree (above, right) was lemongrass beef wrapped in wild betal leaves. (The owner, Jimmy, told us repeatedly that this differed from Com’s dish in that the leaf is “wild, from the vine, rather than from a tree.”) We wrapped the stuffed leaves in rice paper along with vermicelli, herbs and — most wonderful –star fruit and plantains.

We also tried one of the Chinese dishes — flat rice noodles with shrimp, scallops and squid (above, left). The noodles, new to me, were even better than the seafood, although all of it was fresh and flavorful too. There are several pages of noodle dishes, including 17 bun dishes.

If you are going to only one restaurant this week, let this be it. The restaurant is located about a half-mile north of Buford Highway’s intersection with Dresden Drive. It’s in a new strip mall, with several other new Vietnamese cafes and a Latino night club.

I’ll have more to say in “Grazing” soon.

Bookmark to: