Green Bamboo January 18th 2017

Present: Megan, Jim, Karen, John, Ron, Andrew

Back in action

We started the new year back with an old favourite – the Green Bamboo in Swinger Hill.  It’s a fairly standard Vietnamese restaurant but the food is always reliable and reasonably priced.  It ticks a few other boxes for us - quiet, close-by and plenty of parking.   Although the evening was hot, the restaurant was nice and cool when we arrived - no doubt helped by the blinds being drawn. These were raised later in the evening for us to enjoy the spectacular sunset….a highlight of our first restaurant night for 2017.

We started our meal with 2 serves of Vietnamese spring rolls – a standard entrée but done well.  We then shared 5 main dishes (lemon grass lamb, caramelised pork, chicken with cashew nuts, sizzling fish fillet and stir fried vegetables with bean curd).  With steamed rice, this was plenty of food for the six of us without over-indulging.  The 2 most popular dishes of the night were the lemon grass lamb and sizzling fish.  The finely chopped lemon grass added both taste and texture to the dish and nicely complemented the lamb.   The fish had a crisp (fried) battered coating which married well with a light, sweet-style sauce. 

The other dishes were all individually nice but unfortunately they were very similar in both presentation and taste which made the banquet seem quite boring. Each dish was also very sweet and seemed to overpower the fresher elements of the dish, particularly the vegetables.          

Not surprisingly after a lot of sweet main dishes, Andrew, Megan and John opted to skip dessert but our dessert aficionados (Ron and Jim) were still keen and ordered fried bananas and Karen decided to try the fried ice cream.  The desserts were quite standard but again done well.  The fried ice cream was the nicer of the two desserts – it was perfectly cooked in fresh oil and the “cakey” coating had a lovely coconut flavour.

Overall, we would have preferred more freshness and variety in the dishes but it was still nice to be back in action and we’re looking forward to more restaurant nights in 2017!