I love ASEAN cuisines, Thai, Indonesian, Vietnamese and Filipino. Unfortunately, we only have some places selling some Indonesian delights and a Thai restaurant that people say has gone downhill since the Thai chefs went home.
No, we do not have any Filipino restaurants here even though many Chinese restaurants in town serve that crispy pata and they call it Philippine pork leg and yes, we have had a Vietnamese place once and a stall in a coffee shop too, but they did not last very long.
That was why I couldn’t wait to check this place out in Miri but unfortunately, I did not think it was all that great. Thankfully, we went to a really good one in Kuching but the way things are going these days, I don’t suppose we will ever get to hop over again to go and eat there.
Well, it so happened that my missus picked up two packets of this…
…at the supermarket at the mall round the corner from my house. Boy! Was she excited when she cooked one to try!!! She loved it so much and she told me straight away in no uncertain terms not to blog about it so they would not be sold out (like what happened to the Aussie wagyu that day) and she would be able to rush over and buy some more…which she did and she came home with around a dozen packets of the beef and some of the chicken.
One can easily guess from all that in Vietnamese on the packet that it is made in Vietnam. Phở bò means beef (flat) rice noodles (kway teow) and Hà Nội is Hanoi in Vietnamese, the capital of Vietnam. The chicken one is phở gà Hà Nội.
Inside the packet, you can find the noodles and three sachets…
Inside the red one is something like chili sauce and the gỏi rau, translated to mean vegetable salad, looked like dehydrated spring onion, fried shallots and fried garlic to me. I guess the xương hàm in the big sachet is the seasoning in liquid/sauce form, unlike most where it is usually in powder form and there are small bits of meat in it.
I boiled the noodles in a bit of water, emptied the contents in all the sachets into the pot, added a few Thai basil leaves from my garden and poured everything into a bowl. I served it with a few slices of beef (Aussie wagyu, no less) and some of the chili (from my garden) that I pounded with ginger and lime, garnished generously with chopped spring onion (also from my garden)…
Yes, I really must say it was so so so good despite being nothing more than just instant noodles.
According to my missus, they’re only RM1.90 a packet…
…and the chicken one is also very nice. I certainly will give that a try one of these days.
DELTA – THE MARKETPLACE (2.311968, 111.847043) is located in the basement of the Delta Mall, Taman Seduan 8, Jalan Dr Wong Soon Kai.
...STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS! 