A few years ago we discovered Quang, just a couple of blocks up Nicollet Ave, and since then we haven’t ventured anywhere else whenever we’ve craved Vietnamese: reliably good—and I might even venture to say great—food isn’t conducive to experimentation. But being a reviewer isn’t about playing safe, and when a reader wrote to The Lunch suggesting that we should check out Pho Tau Bay B and I put it on our list.

Not much has changed outside or inside the restaurant in the four or so years since my last visit. The building remains as unprepossessing as ever, the family members running the place still struggle with English, and the credo is still "low budget and authentic."

The menu is long and can take a while to peruse. Appetizers include five different types of spring/egg rolls plus exotica such as papaya with beef liver. Twenty plus phos as well as other noodle soups are the core of the offerings. Combination platters are also available. An "Authentic Vietnamese Entrees" category features vermicelli noodles or steamed rice with novelties like pork fondue. For the less adventurous diner, there is also a selection of lo mein, stir fries, and the like. Most of the dishes can be ordered in small or large sizes.

The phos include a seafood one. I had always assumed pho contained beef in some form, and now know that the defining ingredient is beef stock. (This reduction in ignorance due to the Web; I tried to find out what defined pho from our waitress but we ended up having a comic exchange that had entertainment but no information value.) I ordered more in line with my prior experience, going for pho with sliced beef and meatballs. This came with the standard accompaniments of basil, bean sprouts, hot green peppers, and lime.

The verdict: Good but not up to Quang’s standard. The broth was a little too light for my taste and lacked the flavor and aroma I’ve come to associate it with. The noodles were caked at the bottom of the bowl and hard to separate. The meatballs were somewhat rubbery. B ordered a grilled beef and noodle dish. He liked it; I give it the same verdict. We also split an order of grilled pork spring rolls as a starter. The grilled pork was spicy and tasty. They were quite substantial—not only in the amount of meat in them but in their dimensions.

I had a Vietnamese iced coffee with condensed milk and recommend that too. To round out the meal, B ordered a Vietnamese dessert, an exotic concoction of tropical fruit in coconut milk. We were trying to identify lychee, durian, and mango in it. I don’t think there was any of the last, and it’s been too long since I had the others. We agreed that the ice in the glass made it too hard to get at the fruit pieces.

Service, style, charm, these sorts of virtues are not to be found at Pho Tau Bay. We waited forever before someone came for our dessert order, the smoking and nonsmoking partitions are either fluid or nonexistent (this doesn’t bother me all that much but B is an antismoking zealot), much of the art on the walls seems to be Chinese rather than Vietnamese, and the furnishings are cheap and uninspired.

I’m lukewarm about the place. Frankly, there are only two reasons to go here and not to Quang: i) Quang can run out of pho sometimes (but then you can get the grilled beef salad, for example), and ii) Pho Tau Bay’s menu is considerably larger and there are lots of items on it that you won’t find at its competition.

From the above you’ve probably made out that The Lunch goes to Pho Tau Bay, a Vietnamese restaurant on Eat Street. This is the first review done as a response to a reader’s request (so keep them coming). For people unfamiliar with the area, finding this place could be tricky: it’s across from a car wash, where one is surprised to find a largish building that houses the restaurant. The décor is bought from the same source that supplies it to ninety percent of oriental restaurants – i.e. the color scheme, furnishings and artwork are hackneyed; tellingly, on the wall, there is an artistic rendition of the Great Wall of China, in a Vietnamese restaurant!

The menu is extensive and is divided into pho (rice noodle soups), hu tieu (also rice noodle soup – the difference wasn’t clear to us), mi (egg noodle soup), bun (rice stick noodles) and a section devoted to "authentic Vietnamese entrées". There is a variation on almost every theme. For instance a simple dish of rice noodle and beef can be a pho tai gau (rice noodle soup, sliced beef, brisket) or a pho tai gan (rice noodle soup, sliced beef, tendon) or a pho tai sach (rice noodle soup, slice beef, tripe) and so on. Be warned Pho Tau Bay does not possess a beer/wine license – I wanted to order cold Vietnamese coffee, but A talked me out of it – so I ordered lemonade that was almost lethal in its sweetness! As an appetizer we shared an order of goi cuon thit nuong (spring rolls with shredded pork served with fish sauce) this was good with liberal quantities of pork. I had the bun bo xao (rice vermicelli with stir fried beef, fresh vegetables, served with fish sauce) as my main entrée. The beef had a good flavor but the vegetables had been over cooked and I had my doubts about the rice vermicelli – but that was probably just my palate; this is more A’s country than mine! All dishes are offered as small or large, in my opinion the large dishes would be too much food. I finished my meal by choosing one of the – very reasonably priced and exotic sounding – desserts, a che thai (tropical fruits and coconut milk sweet dessert), which turned out to be a watery concoction with the tropical fruits being unrecognizable. Do try the desserts by all means they all sound so interesting: mixed fruits and seaweed sweet dessert drink; tri-colored sweet dessert; etc.

The service isn’t good. It was hard to flag down a waitress to get our bill and then it was never explained to us that the bill had to be paid at the counter. I am looking forward to reading A’s comments about this restaurant and to see how it suffers in comparison to his beloved Quang’s Deli. Was the tripe to his liking? We’ll just have to wait to find out. Continuing with our "lunch on a budget theme" the bill was about $21.00.

B