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| - One thing I must emphasize is this restaurant's goi cuon (shrimp, pork and lettuce with rice noodles wrapped in rice paper). They make the best ones I've had to date: they're larger than most places and, most importantly, they use the more expensive, thinner rice paper. Why is that important? The thicker rice paper used in most of the other restaurants are not only cheaper, but much easier to roll. The thinner cut is much harder to roll, because if you're not fast, the paper sticks to itself. From a visual outlook, the thinner ones are much clearer and you cannot only see the contents more clearly, it gives a "fresher" appearance to the rolls. But most important is the taste: much less "crunchy" than with thicker skins and you taste much more of the contents than in other rolls, where the thick skin steals some of the taste by "overpowering" the shrimp, pork, etc. The real test comes with what I call the "refrigerator test". As I live quite a ways from this restaurant, I usually order an extra 5 of these rolls to take home and have for breakfast during the week. Now, refrigerators are not a friend of these rolls, no matter who makes it. However, other restaurants' rolls get crunchy and stale by the very next morning. In contrast, the rolls from Dong A tend to take a much longer time to "deteriorate" (the skin doesn't get tough, but the shrimp starts to "go" and there's a slimy feeling to the roll). Since we're talking about a sitting time of five days or so, it is naturally very desirable to have something that won't taste like you're eating shrimp in an old newspaper.
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