No. 105, Ziqiang 3rd Rd, Lingya Dist
高雄市苓雅區自強三路105號
(07)333-7403
Monday-Sunday
11:00am-12:30am
website: http://www.alian.com.tw
English friendly: ...yes!?!
vegetarian friendly: no
average cost: 70-100NTD
Don't worry, this Vietnamese operated restaurant in Ziqiang Night Market takes its name from the unfortunate Romanization of the 阿蓮 district in rural Kaohsiung. From what I can tell, the owners are not actually aliens. And if they are, well. They are using their alien technology to make really good food.
Their menu is ENORMS--too big, indeed, to fit in this picture--with all sorts of 河粉, other noodles, soups, and a selection of specialty Vietnamese side dishes. If you choose 河粉, like you should, you can pick between flat, clear "tapioca" noodles (made from mung bean) or rounder, whiter rice noodles, and you can get them within soup or without. As a bonus, the English translations on the menu offer you an engaging source of pre-dinner entertainment.
The "total beef" tapioca noodles (not the "total surface of bovine"--that will have to wait until next time) without soup still came with a little cup of soup on the side, which was thoughtful of them. If you choose to pour it on top of the noodles as suggested, you get the perfect combination of fried noodles and soup noodles, with a bountiful bouquet of toppings. It turns out that "total beef" includes cow stomach (that's that weird white thing up the in the lefthand corner, if you didn't know) as well as other mysterious selections from the cow's innermost chambers. A delight!
The noodles were good! No wider than your standard linguini noodle (sorry I am a noodle snob with unrealistic expectations), and not necessarily handmade, but still. They were good.
I chose the hot and sour seafood rice noodles, which only came in soup... Because. Hot and sour soup is a soup.
After seeing the two types of noodles in front of me I regretted not picking the tapioca option: when I think of 河粉 I think of wide, flat, greasy dirty oily noodles (mmmmm...), and these guys didn't exactly do the trick. Still, the soup was tasty and the toppings were bountiful!
This place also offers a selection of exotic Vietnamese beers, which is really fun.
The star of the entire meal, however, was this Vietnamese shrimp and pork pancake. Those of us who have spent some time eating food in Taiwan may be familiar with the famous 月亮蝦餅 or moonlight shrimp pancake, alternatively touted as either a Thai or Vietnamese delicacy though I do believe it is entirely the product of Taiwanese ingenuity. The 月亮蝦餅 is basically a shrimp ball in pancake form... this guy is completely different. The shrimp + pork + bean sprout filling comes wrapped in a thin, oily pancake; they aren't one body, as it were, until you combine them yourself.
By the way, if you can't tell from the picture this thing is GINORMOUS. Definitely bigger than my face, possibly bigger than two people's faces.
As the somewhat brusque server instructed us, you are supposed to cut off a section of pancake (making sure that the filling doesn't spill out), wrap it all up in a lettuce leaf and add a leaf of basil for good measure. The shrimp in the filling are still whole and not completely de-shelled, but somehow that worked out just fine. I don't exactly remember how. I don't know, I was distracted by how DELICIOUS it was.
I'm serious guys, I probably drop the word 'delicious' a lot but this dish was really Above and Beyond. The pancake was chewy but crispy, the filling was more than generous, and the basil leaf with the oil from the pancake gave the whole thing a slight pesto bent that hit me right in the heart.
I recommend going to this restaurant for the shrimp and pork pancake alone, but you don't have to: a gigantic menu worth of delicious authentic Vietnamese food awaits your discovery.
OVERALL REVIEW: 4/5
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