It’s time also to reacquaint oneself with that most wintry of foodstuffs, the hearty soup, and what better place to do that than at a good Vietnamese restaurant. The Lunch headed to Quang this week, a restaurant that I’ve praised in these pages before.

I think of Quang as effecting an ideal marriage between authentic "exotic" fare and accessibility for the American palate. From the helpful menu photographs of dishes you’ve never seen before to the Vietnamese waitstaff with their perfect American-high-school English (they seem mostly to be high-school kids), the intimidation factor is alleviated—and once you taste the food who cares anyway?

B and I started with the fried shrimp and yam appetizer. This consists of shredded yam and unpeeled shrimp, deep fried into unappetizing-looking large orange globs. One bite, though, and you’ll start thinking of this dish as the perfect comfort food. The deep frying and the shrimp tails (these are embedded within the glob) give the dish enough crunch to complement the soft, almost-but-not-quite gooey mass. The dish is sweet, thanks to the yams, and light on spices but you get a dipping bowl of fish sauce with it. It’s the kind of dish that you eat with your hands and then lick your fingers. The serving size is huge, though. One appetizer could feed at least four and perhaps eight!

B and I got what, based on past experience, I think of as two of the best entrees Quang offers, the grilled beef salad and the seafood and pork rice noodle soup (D9 and S2, respectively, for the initiated). Depending on what kind of soup you order, you also get a side plate of add-ins. For S2 these are bean sprouts, sliced jalapenos, and lime quarters (phôs come with fresh basil as well). Every table also contains a trayful of condiments; I rely on the sriracha and the crushed red peppers in oil. The broth for my soup seemed sweeter and less flavorful than usual, although after I’d added my spices and the add-ins I was happy enough.

S2, as with all soups, comes in a large bowl with a generous quantity of noodles at the bottom. Quang has a special touch with noodles, especially the rice noodles; they are toothy yet delicate, not clumped or glommed together at all. Other visible ingredients are jumbo shrimp (you get two of them, and they should be eaten first otherwise they’ll cook in the broth), crabmeat, pork meatballs, and roast pork. The soups are substantial dishes, and they’ve often served as my only meal of the day.

But somehow B wasn’t sated, so we ordered the "tricolor dessert," a layered concoction served in a glass. The top layer looked and tasted like rice pudding although from its texture it could have been made with crushed rice. Then there was a yellow bean layer, followed by some black beans, and, at the bottom, narrow strips of some green cartilaginous material (but I’m sure it was something much less objectionable—to some palates—than cartilage!). Wait … shouldn’t that have made it a "tetracolor dessert"? Anyway, I’m not used to having beans for dessert, but I found the dish refreshing and, although I was too full to do it justice, actually lighter than I had expected it to be..

The reason I never normally have dessert at Quang is that I almost always order the Vietnamese iced coffee with condensed milk, a beverage that simultaneously serves as caffeine fix, liquid accompaniment, and dessert (think melted Haagen Dazs coffee ice cream with an extra shot). The coffee was exceptionally good this day, the best I’ve had in a while: strong and creamy without being too sweet. If you’re not looking for something as rich as this, I also highly recommend Quang’s lemonade.

I go to Quang often, as you no doubt can tell, but it’s almost always for weekend lunches and I was surprised by the difference in atmosphere. The place is often jam-packed during weekends and although business was fine on our visit I missed the energy and hubbub. I also missed the weekend waitstaff—the aforementioned high-school-age kids who are both competent and hip. Our waitress in this instance was neither. Perhaps the food might have been a notch lower too.

Counterpoint: I was asking a Vietnamese woman at work, who I hear is an excellent cook, if she recommended any Vietnamese restaurants in town. According to her, none is up to the mark, especially when it comes to phô and other soups. Virtually all of them substitute sugar and MSG for bone marrow, enough fish sauce, and the right herbs—an analogy might be the bouillon-cube approach to chicken soup, perhaps. If there are any exceptions Quang isn’t one of them—she did mention Kimsun in Bloomington and My Village in St. Paul as doing some things right. With winter almost here, I expect I’ll be checking them out soon.

First a word of warning: Quang isn’t for the faint of heart. If you come here expecting anything other than your extremely basic Asian restaurant with the standard accompanying décor you’re going to be disappointed. Quang also leaves something to be desired in the area of cleanliness. Our table and my seat had vestiges of the previous meal – not a pleasant thing. Normally I would be more forgiving given that this restaurant is extremely popular and the rush to get diners to their tables might preclude a thorough cleaning but at 11:25 AM there was no such excuse. I asked to be seated in the nonsmoking area but that was akin to asking for a small smog-free haven in Los Angeles! The smoke is widespread and hangs thick. It permeates everything and that in my book is an unpardonable sin for a restaurant. On the plus side Quang offers off-street parking for its patrons, a luxury for Nicollet.

Quang is a family destination. Walking to the restaurant I saw three generations of the same family ahead of me. The Grandmother holding on to her daughter’s arm who in turn had a baby in her arms. Inside the restaurant has booths with leather upholstered seats and a line of flower portraits on the wall. The floor is well worn with the tooing and froing of a multitude of diners.

The menu is colorful with pictures of menu items on it. This, obviously, means that the menu isn’t often, if ever, changed. This is probably no bad thing since Quang’s menu is of legendary fame with its ethnic fans (that would be the entire Vietnamese population of Minneapolis) and the omnivorous, not to mention adventurous natives. Where else but Quang could you be tempted by delicacies like beef and pork hock or rich porridge with pork innards washed down with lashings of egg soda? In all fairness, though, the menu is extensive with a large salad list, platters, noodle soups and sandwiches that run the gamut of every combination of pork, beef, seafood, and mock dock imaginable (and some that boggle the mind!).

We started with a shared appetizer, an order of fried shrimp with yams. This is a more substantial dish than you might imagine; the fried shrimp is embedded deep in compressed yam, fashioned as you might a brick, and the whole mass is fried for good measure. To eat it simply break of a chunk – the taste is more than acceptable. From the beverage list I could have chosen from such standouts as condensed milk iced coffee, pennywort drink, Quang’s limeade. Instead I chose the young coconut milk with flesh and not unsurprisingly its shockingly sweet assault on the senses was too much for me. I think my imagined fondness for coconut milk is product of having read The Swiss Family Robinson at an impressionable age, which convinces me every couple of years to give it another try. If it were the middle of winter I would have opted for a pho, which is about the only time I can tolerate them. Now I ordered—what seemed the safest dish on the menu—bun thit bo nuong (grilled beef salad). The salad consists of rice vermicelli, lettuce, bean sprouts, cucumbers, mint, cilantro, pickled carrots, beans and covered with strips of savory grilled beef. The beef was warmly delicious and only (very) occasionally chewy. The pickled carrots and the rice vermicelli provided the contrapuntal exclamation to an excellent dish. I ordered a Vietnamese dessert to round up The Lunch; a tri-colored dessert that consisted of crushed ice and beans infused with different colors.

Quang is a place that believes in the old adage: waste not want not. Every conceivable piece of an animal’s carcass is used to create the various dishes on offer and you just have to check your Western sensibilities at the door. The atmosphere is not the most pleasant in the world but we don’t dine at Quang for its atmosphere; the food is first rate.

In the end I’d like to plug a restaurant that’s fallen on hard times and is likely to close without more patronage. I speak of Machu Picchu the Peruvian restaurant on Lyndale. I dined there earlier this week and was shocked to discover that we were the only diners in a large restaurant.