Vung Tau (Downtown San Jose)
food: 1.5/5
experience: 0/5
overall: 0/5
Three strikes and you're out.
I visited Vung Tau a few times during my semester in San Jose. I gave it a fair shot. I did. But this restaurant isn't for me.
The first time I came, I got take-out. Just a basic seafood with vegetables dish. Canh cai thap cam. Sixteen bucks. Some shit right there. You'd think it'd be the soup to end all soups. It was not. It was even less than my lowest expectation.
With only three shrimps, three pieces of calamari, and four "fish cakes" swimming in clear broth, this was potentially the most pathetic soup I'd ever seen. The rest was vegetables, primarily cheap unsatisfying ones like cabbage and bok choy.
If that weren't bad enough, it wasn't even warm. The broth was hot, but they put all the solid ingredients into another container and those were cold. This box of vegetables and six pieces of shellfish apparently took some genius twenty whole minutes to assemble since I had to sit there and wait.
I thought I'd give it a second shot because they did have an extensive menu I wanted to try. I went with one of their vegetable dishes. Just mixed vegetables stir-fried.
It had that basic thick, soy-sauce-based brown sauce on it that every Vietnamese/Thai/etc. uses. It was decent. Twelve bucks is pretty up there for vegetables but it was definitely better than the soup, in price and filling-ness.
Okay, getting there. Or so I thought. I went for another go. Turns out I should've gone with my initial impression the first visit. Funny how I'm willing to give a shitty restaurant so many chances. Something something abusive relationships. The only reason I kept coming was it was about a mile away from campus and it's very hard to go wrong with Asian food.
They don't do any accommodations. No sauce on the side, no steamed tofu instead of fried. I can understand the sauce because you need to cook in it but how hard is it to not fry tofu? You just... don't. Fry. It.
I ordered the basil eggplant tofu dish. What arrived was a mass of eggplant, tofu, and some other stuff just drenched, covered in oil.
I couldn't even eat it. The sauce wasn't even good either. It just tasted sugary and basic. I spent thirteen bucks on this and it just sat in the fridge. I don't remember who ate it but I should have given it to my roommate's dog.
Authentic Vietnamese food this cannot be. I was looking for a healthy Vietnamese restaurant and instead I got a heart attack in a dish. Never went back and actually pissed off I went as many times as I did.
experience: 0/5
overall: 0/5
Three strikes and you're out.
I visited Vung Tau a few times during my semester in San Jose. I gave it a fair shot. I did. But this restaurant isn't for me.
The first time I came, I got take-out. Just a basic seafood with vegetables dish. Canh cai thap cam. Sixteen bucks. Some shit right there. You'd think it'd be the soup to end all soups. It was not. It was even less than my lowest expectation.
With only three shrimps, three pieces of calamari, and four "fish cakes" swimming in clear broth, this was potentially the most pathetic soup I'd ever seen. The rest was vegetables, primarily cheap unsatisfying ones like cabbage and bok choy.
If that weren't bad enough, it wasn't even warm. The broth was hot, but they put all the solid ingredients into another container and those were cold. This box of vegetables and six pieces of shellfish apparently took some genius twenty whole minutes to assemble since I had to sit there and wait.
I thought I'd give it a second shot because they did have an extensive menu I wanted to try. I went with one of their vegetable dishes. Just mixed vegetables stir-fried.
It had that basic thick, soy-sauce-based brown sauce on it that every Vietnamese/Thai/etc. uses. It was decent. Twelve bucks is pretty up there for vegetables but it was definitely better than the soup, in price and filling-ness.
Okay, getting there. Or so I thought. I went for another go. Turns out I should've gone with my initial impression the first visit. Funny how I'm willing to give a shitty restaurant so many chances. Something something abusive relationships. The only reason I kept coming was it was about a mile away from campus and it's very hard to go wrong with Asian food.
They don't do any accommodations. No sauce on the side, no steamed tofu instead of fried. I can understand the sauce because you need to cook in it but how hard is it to not fry tofu? You just... don't. Fry. It.
I ordered the basil eggplant tofu dish. What arrived was a mass of eggplant, tofu, and some other stuff just drenched, covered in oil.
I couldn't even eat it. The sauce wasn't even good either. It just tasted sugary and basic. I spent thirteen bucks on this and it just sat in the fridge. I don't remember who ate it but I should have given it to my roommate's dog.
Authentic Vietnamese food this cannot be. I was looking for a healthy Vietnamese restaurant and instead I got a heart attack in a dish. Never went back and actually pissed off I went as many times as I did.
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