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| - In the back of Viet Hoa (where Joe's Kitchen used to be), a new chef is serving quick, cheap noodle dishes. We stopped in for some sauteed wide rice noodles with beef and a bowl of noodle soup with shrimp. It's a pretty small menu, maybe 10 choices, with some standard stuff (e.g., the ubiquitous General Tso's Chicken) and some different stuff (a Crispy Crepe is intriguing). I think each dish cost $6 or $7. Ours were nice generous portions. The affable chef (Bopa? forgot to ask) says he's cooked in local Chinese restaurants for a while, but that his food's more Malaysian than Chinese. Both our dishes had a sweet/hot thing going on that made it impossible to stop eating.
The sauteed rice noodles had a savory oyster-sauce based flavor helped along with the chili pasted the chef says he makes himself, plus a handful of bean sprouts. Cooked in a flash over what must have been a ridiculously hot fire, as there was a nice bit of sear on some of the noodles. Good, but next time I'll ask for a more substantial portion of Chinese broccoli in it. The soup was great: a big pile of fresh round egg noodles swimming in a rich, red, shrimp-based sweet/sour broth. I'm going to ask for more broccoli in the soup next time, too. But I'm definitely going back.
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