September 26, 2006 Archives

On Friday, Nhi, Wee's Vietnamese friend, took us to Ong Ca Can, a Viet restaurant on Ste-Catherine, which also serves anything but Pho (the other one being "Harmonie d'Asie"; finally got the name right). It's another joint which our family had been to before - but a long time ago, when before the restaurant renovated to sort of become upscale-ish chic ethnic restaurant (like Nonya, Montreal's ever-nomadic Indonesian restaurant, say).

I don't remember the food so much, because we haven't been since I was in my early teens. Sweet barbecued meats wrapped in wine leaves and pork tripes are probably a specialty (and the only thing we had, which I remember having there before). For entree, we had a Vietnamese-style salad, which uses white radish and carrots as a base, and which also contained sliced pork ears. They served us individual bowls of soup, which was a cloudy egg soup for the boys, and Vietnamese congee for the ladies. It looked nothing like the congee they serve on that other restaurant on Jean-Talon close to Parc, because the one at Ong Ca Can looked like it did not contain any of the 'ugly meat', like pork stomach, blood sausage (which is sorta yummy, in a tofu kind of way) and other unidentified animal parts, but only had ground beef. Boring, isn't it? I am forgetting about other items, because the bill did add up to $30 a person.