Rice Paper

We may have expressed this thought before, but we'll do it again after experiencing further confirmative evidence - if the name of a restaurant features a certain dish, you should probably order that and not be tempted otherwise. Our latest case of this was ordering entrees at Rice Paper, a Vietnamese restaurant in Civic, where the curry puffs turned out to be average, but the rice paper rolls were, of course, delicious.

On that visit and our previous visits the food has generally been pretty good. Among the vegetarian dishes the mushroom and tofu dish is clearly the better option; for meat-eaters we recommend prawns with chili and lemon grass, and the red duck curry with lychees and potato. The soft-shell crab is possibly a little overpriced though, for what it is. The service is generally very friendly, and the carafe wine cheerful - unlike (who we presume is) the owners' son sulking behind the counter. On the wall are photos of opera houses and street scenes from the French colonial period. Whether these represent a certain nostalgia of the owners or are attempts to pander to a possible nostalgia for 19th/early 20th century Western imperialism among the majority of the clientele is, however, somewhat unclear.

Tudo

In thinking about how to write up our lunch at Tudo this weekend we struggled. There just didn't seem to be an obvious angle - until - we decided that this absence of an angle would become the story. Thus, in sum, we have decided to pronounce Tudo, a little Vietnamese restaurant in the O'Connor shops, as average, ordinary, and unremarkable, in the true, non-pejorative senses of those words.

Tudo doesn't really do anything wrong (or at least didn't on this visit) while at the same time, its food (in both quality and price), service, atmosphere, and so on are just not really that distinctive. It is perhaps an archetypal Vietnamese-restaurant-in-Australia. Within Canberra, it compares neither favourably or unfavourably with Rice Paper (Civic), Au Lac, the Asian Noodle House, or the place in Erindale we reviewed a while ago.

On our last visit we had the Red Cooked Tofu and the Lemongrass and Chile Beef, both of which were aromatic and tasty. On a previous visit one of us greatly enjoyed the Special Beef Soup with Rice Noodles. Generally, the soups seems to be the strengths (and most popular items) of the menu. While this time the service was fine, on other occasions one of us dining alone felt that they were treated with rudeness and disdain for taking up table-space as sole diner on a busy weekday lunch. Overall, we're a bit ambivalent about Tudo.

Erindale Vietnamese Restaurant

If Middle Australia were a place it might be the Erindale Centre in Tuggeranong. Unpretentious members of "working families", kids in hoodies loitering outside fast food shops, a few burger wrappers, pizza boxes, and discarded bottles in the gutter - against a backdrop of gaudy yet essentially generic signage and sprawling carparking - it's got most of the basic elements.

Also, tucked away around a corner of one row of shops is the Erindale Vietnamese Restaurant - where time seems to have not moved on from the late-80s or early-90s. Orange vinyl upholstered seats are set around wood-patterned formica-covered tables. Payment by credit card still takes place via an old sliding zip-zap contraption with paper dockets. There are real orchids, low prices, and menus with quirky spelling and grammar.

That all said, the food is OK - tasty and relatively light. Funnily enough the retro-aesthetic also extended to one of our dishes. Made with the restaurant's "special sauce", one bite immediately stirred memories of Chinese takeaways in another unremarkable suburb of a decade or so ago. This perhaps sums up the place, along with Erindale, in that they both seem like they could be anywhere, yet for us at least, also feel profoundly homely and familiar.

Au Lac

Dickson is somewhat locally well-known as being Canberra's "Chinatown", although there are very few dragons or pandas lurking around. Apart from a few importer-grocery shops, and the legend of a young Jackie Chan having walked its streets, there isn't really much, at least from a superficial glancing, to support this imagination of place. It could be equally argued that American fast-food chains appear to be just as prominent in the commercial area's streetscape.

However, what Dickson does have is Au Lac - one of the city's better fake meat places (along with the nearby Kingsland). Fake meat, for the unacquainted, is a textured soy-based product that can be made into meat-ish dishes, typically by South-East Asian Buddhists. White meats (i.e. fake chicken, duck, or fish) are typically far more convincing than attempts at imitating red meat, and when done well, can even be tasty.

Accompanied by a soothing indoor waterfall (more restaurants should have one), guests at Au Lac ought to order the "Noodle Laksa" for $10 - and within 5-10 minutes they will be presented with a delicious spicy bowl of coconut milk, spice, veges, and radically tranformed soy. Most of the other dishes are OK, but the laksa really is the stand-out.