https://webpos.wlinformation.com/hanoibistro/

I forgot to blog about this restaurant we went to on Tuesday night. I had an optometrist appt on Tues afternoon at Taraval Eyecare just to get a check-up and see how my vision is doing. My slight astigmatism is stable and now my left eye has caught up with my right eye… so now when I buy contacts, I don’t need to buy two different ones! hooray!

Since we were in the area, we decided to meet up with Tiff for dinner and she suggested Hanoi Bistro which is on the corner of Taraval and 19th Ave. While we were waiting for her to come back from shopping, we went to the public library down the street to get a library card! I haven’t had a public library card since high school. The SF system seems pretty convenient though, you can request books online to be held at a certain branch and you can return your books to any branch, not just the one you checked it out of.

At the restaurant, while waiting for Tiff, we ordered some appetizers to start, I got one of my favorite drinks, the three color drink. I was a little disappointed since it felt like there weren’t that many beans or jelly threads and later during dinner I saw them serve one to another guy that had way more stuff in it…

We ordered the fresh spring rolls and were able to have them make us half shrimp and half shredded pork. These were yummy. I always feel refreshed after eating them.

This is the pan fried onion cake. A bit oily but the outside was nice and crispy. The curry sauce could have been a little thicker as it kept on sliding off the onion cake.

After Tiff came, we ordered the rest of the main courses. This is the garlic noodles with five spice chicken. The garlic noodles were so good, lots of garlic flavor for sure! The chicken wasn’t too special, still moist so that was good.

Not a very good picture but here is the tamarind crab. The restaurant has a sign out front touting “Holiday Crab Special $19.95” so Tiff says she’s been wanting to try it since she drives by the sign at least twice a day. The sauce was tangy but the crab was so hard to eat, it was so saucy and the meat was hard to get out of the shell. We were exhausted after eating only a few legs.

We also had a bowl of pho which I didn’t photograph. It isn’t served with the plate of bean sprouts, mint, jalepenos, etc. Just the noodle soup. The noodles they have are the slightly wider flat noodles which is a nice twist.

Ron and I look forward to going back to try their tamarind chicken. The tamarind sauce was really good on the crab so it should be really good on fried chicken… mmm-mm…

Oh, interesting site I found while looking for the restaurants website, it seems like a health code inspection site of restaurants in SF, good thing that Hanoi Bistro passed without any violations…

Hanoi Bistro
890 Taraval St (corner of 19th Ave)