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| - Having a chance to go out sans enfant, my husband and I decided to give Anise a try. We both love Vietnamese food--upscale or downhome--so the menu was familiar territory. In fact, a tad too familiar. Even the house special "Anise Noodles" was nothing new (nor did it contain any anise, but that's another story).
Just as I tend to judge a REAL seafood place by its crab cakes, I pay very close attention to the ch giò, aka spring/summer rolls. The sampler appetizer included two fried and one fresh (cut into two servings). It also included Shrimp Bruschetta.
The fresh roll was just fine. The only thing that redeemed the fried ones was the fresh lettuce, mint and perilla. Wrap a fried anything in that combo and it'll taste good. (side note: so far, the best tasting, albeit sometimes greasy, fried rolls I've had around here are at Pho Da Lat.) The big surprise came with the oddly-named Shrimp Bruschetta. Something pretty magical happens when you dip that piece of toasted bread in the fish sauce. It went from okay to downright tasty.
For our main course, my husband had the house special Anise noodles. They were, to put it mildly, practically tasteless. In fact, he wound up dumping a bunch of fish sauce AND the dressing from my salad over the noodles to try to give them some oompf. Pretty disappointing. On the other hand, my dish was a green bean and prawn salad. OH MY GOSH, good! And I had pretty high expectation, because the owner's wife, who took our order, said, "Good choice" when I picked the dish. In any case, the salad was a perfect blend of textures, fabulous sweet-sour-salty dressing, with just a touch of bitterness from the herbs. My poor husband poked around in his noodle bowl while I gobbled up my dinner.
I still had room left, and so decided to order a dessert. Curious as to what the owner would recommend, when he came by our table, I asked his opinion. He said, without hesitation, "banana pudding." Now, I'm a girl from the south, so it's hard for me not to dredge up images of yellow custard with Nilla wafers and banana slices. Folks, this dessert couldn't get any further from that old standby. We were presented with a silver dish that appeared to contain a white tapioca pudding, sprinkled with chopped peanuts. Where's the banana? Tasted the pudding, no banana. Hmm. Then we started to dig a little with our spoons and that's when things got really interesting. Beneath the tapioca was a layer of gooey, hot, pan-roasted banana. Put a little of each component on your spoon and voila! If I'd been at home, I would've scraped the dish clean with my fingers--it was that good.
So, all in all, the meal was a mixed bag. But I've come to find that that's usually the way of restaurants. We'll be back again to see what else the friendly people at Anise do well (or not).
BTW, the wine was way overpriced at 8 dollars a glass. But the food was so inexpensive, I hardly cared.
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