Minh Hai Restaurant

Real Deal

There’s more to Vietnamese food than noodles, fish sauce and protein. A lot more. Which is why we needed help navigating Minh Hai’s menu. (We’ll be honest: many of the sixty-plus dishes sound the same, give or take an ingredient.) If you ask a bunch of questions, as we did, you may get lucky and get Minh himself to appear tableside (he mans the small, clean, very well-lit storefront, while brother Hai’s in the kitchen). Minh chose goi bo ($8.50), a spicy grilled beef salad tossed with pickled carrots, daikon, mint, jalapeno peppers and a like-nothing-we’d-ever-tasted, smoky-flavored dressing. And then steered us toward chicken bun cha gio ($7.95), a slurp-worthy traditional vermicelli bowl with bean sprouts, iceberg lettuce and, of course, fish sauce.