LEO's Eats with Robin Garr
For those of us who grew up in an age when we thought a bipartisan series of presidents wanted to send us off to exotic places with strange names like “Vietnam” and “Thailand” to meet nice people and kill them, it is a fine thing that we now go to Vietnamese and Thai restaurants right here in Louisville, meet nice people and eat their delicious food.
The war sputtered to an end with the fall of Saigon in 1975, and it was maybe a decade before the first Vietnamese restaurants appeared in Louisville. In fact, Louisville’s first Vietnamese culinary pioneer, Huong “Coco” Tran (now at Roots/Heart & Soy), entered the Louisville eats scene with Chinese goodies, not Vietnamese treats. She started with Egg Roll Machine before introducing us to Vietnam’s fare at the original Café Mimosa in the mid-’80s.
Around the same time, the nucleus of a Southeast Asian community began to form in the city’s South End thanks to refugee placement agencies assigning most new immigrant families to the Americana Apartments on South Side Drive. Vietnam Kitchen became the iconic Vietnamese spot, Thai-Siam popped up around the same time, and more good ones soon followed.
Nowadays, I can’t think of many parts of the Metro where you won’t find a Vietnamese or Thai restaurant nearby, and that’s a good thing. And now even the hopping St. Matthews nightspot and pizza zone sports a couple recent Vietnamese additions as alternatives for those who can’t face yet another mug of suds and slice of pie. NamNam Café (LEO Weekly, May 4, 2011) is coming up on its second birthday, and Saigon Café also joined the roster recently.
Hiding in plain sight on Fairfax Avenue just around the corner from Trinity High School, Saigon Café shares a small strip center with a branch of the popular El Tarasco Mexican. For a while it had been a branch of Lemongrass, a local Asian mini-chain that tried to span Vietnamese, Thai and Chinese but, in my opinion, did them all passably but none particularly well.
So, meet the new place, just like the old place? I figured that for a while, based on the trajectory of La Que, which took over the Baxter Avenue Lemongrass without changing much. But eventually the food critic’s prime directive caught up with me: “Don’t assume. Check it out.” And I’m mighty glad I did, as Saigon Café is a distinct step up.
Read the full review on LouisvilleHotBytes,
http://www.louisvillehotbytes.com/saigo ... up-a-notch
And in LEO Weekly:
http://leoweekly.com/dining/saigon-caf% ... mese-notch
Saigon Café
106A Fairfax Ave.
893-7757
Rating: 86