Welcome to my first restaurant review! Actually, these won’t be reviews per se, just some photos and my experience eating vegetarian at some yummy restos. We don’t eat out extremely often, and our small city doesn’t have the best selection, but there are some great spots that I hope to share. Locals will get to do some research before trying a new place and the from-away readers will get to look at some pictures and drool on their keyboards. Cool? Cool.
Saigon Noodle House opened last year and is actually located directly across the street from my old office window. They serve Viatnamese and Thai food, and before they opened our city was lacking in those two areas, so when it opened I used to sit at my desk and salivate thinking about the pad thai. For the past week I had been craving their fried tofu, so Daniel and I stopped in on Saturday after the wedding.
I am still getting used to using my camera more publicly so please don’t mind the photos. It didn’t help that we were the only people there at first (it was in the middle of the afternoon).
We ordered the tofu satay for an appetizer, and it came out as fried tofu on a stick with a peanut sauce and vegetables on the side. Those three things pretty much sum up how I wish I could eat for the rest of my life.
I find their tofu took some getting used to the first time I tried this restaurant, because it can be pretty airy inside the fried exterior, but I love it now. I also love the peanut sauce. I ate my share of it in five seconds.
Daniel ordered the Creamy Curry Pad Thai with shrimp for his main course.
I am allergic to shrimp…I think he ordered it on purpose so I couldn’t sample the dish. From what I could tell it was flat rice noodles with a curry sauce, veggies, peanuts and big pieces of shrimp. He cleaned his plate in a very short amount of time and even managed to spill some on his shirt, so I guess that means it was good (we got the stain out…thanks Oxy Clean!).
I was mega-tempted to order the Street Pad Thai with tofu but I decided to try something new and went with the Wok Noodles after asking the waiter about the dish. I find their staff is really knowledgeable, which is nice, and something you don’t see a lot of around here.
The dish came out as flat rice noodles cooked in a wok with a homemade sauce, topped with fried tofu and veggies like broccoli, carrots, sprouts and cilantro. That’s a soya-ish kind of sauce served on the side. I planned on packing up half of it and only eating the other half, but it was really difficult. Even though I did end up packing some up, I ate the leftovers about two hours after leaving the restaurant. I have no regrets.
I also loved that they came out with a plate of different sauces and explained which ones added flavour and which ones added heat.
Dan tackled the homemade chile sauce, which was more of a paste than a sauce — that’s when you know it’s hot.
All in all, it was a great meal and satisfied my fried tofu craving, which I should really only cave into once in a blue moon for obvious reasons (spoiler alert: tofu doesn’t exactly remain healthy once it’s been fried). It is a rarity to open a menu in this city and see vegetarian options for every type of dish, so I loved that. The food was hot, the customer service was great, and my date was handsome. What more can you ask for 
The details:
Saigon Noodle House
1012 Prospect St., Fredericton N.B.
206-3494 (They do takeout!)
