Back in ’Nam

>> Vietnamese dishes are delish
and dressed at Don Que

by GENEVIEVE PAIEMENT

Dong Que sits on a semi-desolate stretch of Rosemont Boulevard, its closest neighbours a swingers club (“For singles and liberated couples,” the sign says) and an exterminator with images of giant cockroaches and spiders splashed across its windows. You’d think that moving from the Asian resto hub of Chinatown (the corner of Clark and René-Levesque, to be exact) to this spot, as Dong Que did a few years ago, would be the kiss of death. But the place does brisk business at lunch and dinner nearly every day of the week.

On a recent visit, I started out with a starter-size bowl of piping-hot pho, aka the classic beef tonkinoise soup ($2.50) and was not disappointed. The broth was delicious, the glassy noodles luscious and the thin-sliced beef tender and tasty. For mains, a pal and I went for two items under the house specialty banner: beef rolls with betle leaves ($9.50) and grilled shrimps with sugar cane ($9.50). The former we chose for the betle leaves, which we’d eaten wrapped around mixtures of shrimp or chicken and peanuts as appetizers in Thai restos, and the latter because sugar cane shrimp (chao tom) is one of my favourite Vietnamese dishes, and it’s uncommon in Montreal.

As it turns out, the beef rolls consisted of sausage-shaped chunks of fragrant, cinnamony, slightly sweet beef wrapped in the betle leaves and fried, so we couldn’t enjoy the refreshing raw betle leaf after all. While the flavour of the beef was quite nice, I found the texture too gristly. We were given sheets of rice paper to wrap the beef in, with the accompanying spread of vermicelli noodles, bean sprouts, wild mint, pickled radish and thin carrots.

The sugar cane shrimp came in the form of two large, oblong pink blobs of minced shrimpy goodness wrapped around sugar cane skewers. Their slightly fermented, sweet taste won me over completely and I took uncouth pleasure in gnawing on the cane.

We paired these dishes with the intriguingly named nid d’amour végétarien with crispy noodles ($9.25) because who doesn’t want to ingest a nest of love? The dish got points for variety (zucchini, carrot, celery, green pepper, mushroom, bok choy) and effort in presentation (the carrots were quaintly flower-shaped, the zucchini decoratively semi-peeled), but there was too much sauce, which made the whole thing a little soupy.

For dessert, we snagged some hot white beans ($2.50) because I have a soft spot for any mushy Southeast Asian deserts involving beans and rice and/or tapioca (this one involved smushed up rice and had just the right amount of coconut-milk sweetness), and a seven-colour iced jelly ($2.95) drink, which we fought over like children, taking turns sucking on the straw until we made that burbling sound that your mother always told you was rude to make in public. Like the Vietnamese rainbow drink, this simply had more of the coloured gelatinous snake shapes, with the coconut milk and red beans.

We returned for lunch a few days later and shared the grilled pork and imperial roll with thin vermicelli ($9.50) and the Vietnamese crepe or bánh xèo ($8.25). This eggy crepe, made with rice flour and coconut milk and typically stuffed with bean sprouts, pork and shrimp, is another fave of mine, which for some reason isn’t common in Montreal. This one was yummy and satisfying, fried until nice and crunchy on the outside as it’s meant to be, but the filling was mostly sprouts with very little pork or shrimp. Still, the flavour was so great that this was nearly forgiven entirely.

As for the grilled pork, it came with the usual accompaniments of fresh vegetables, vermicelli, mint, etc. The meat was steeped in a deep, dark brown sauce reminiscent of teriyaki, but again I found the texture a tad on the gristly side. The imperial roll, however, was perfection: crispy-fried with a delectable stuffing of the usual vermicelli, pork and shaved carrot.

To finish, we sipped some of that robust Vietnamese coffee with condensed milk and noted that the same Vietnamese pop album was playing the last time we visited. We left twitching from the caffeine rush—a perfect antidote for the somnolent effects of such a filling lunch.