Mabel and I were looking for something quick and cheap near Union Square before heading out for the night and Saigon Market fill the bill. It's one of those local places that caters mostly to the NYU crowd since it's 2 blocks from campus. It was fairly crowded for 9:30pm on a Saturday night but we were still able to get a seat immediately.
The menu is fairly overwhelming. It's probably 5 pages long with every kind of Asian food you can think of: rolls, soups, curries, stir fry, noodles, fried rice, whole fish, etc. We started with the shrimp summer rolls to start ($7.75) and I got the Pho Bo ($9.25) and Mabel got the Curry Tau Hu ($12.50). The service is extremely quick and we got the summer rolls in a matter of minutes. It was supposed to have been served with a peanut sauce but instead we got what looked like fish sauce and hoisin sauce which was kind of a bummer because I am a huge fan of peanut sauce and it just wasn't quite the same. The rolls themselves were ok, a bit heavy on the lettuce and rice noodles and not so much on the shrimp. In fact I only got a bite of shrimp on my last bite. But I was more looking forward to the pho. I had remembered coming here years ago when I was in B-school for lunch and not really loving the pho, but I was willing to give it one more chance. This time around it was better than I remembered it and better than my last disastrous outing at Sao Mai. The broth was much more flavorful than the one at Sao Mai and the noodles were cooked well. I would have preferred the slices of meat to be a bit thinner and more on the rare/raw side rather than fully cooked. It was an acceptable pho but not something that was overly impressive. I tried a few bites of Mabel's dish which was bean curd, mushrooms, peppers, broccoli, etc in a coconut curry sauce but the sauce tasted more like a corn starchy brown sauce instead. It was fine - a very basic stir fry kind of dish and it was also huge. It was big enough for at least two people to eat.
All in all, the place suited what we were looking for: cheap, quick and convenient to Union Square. I wouldn't make this a destination restaurant by any means but if you are in the area and have a Vietnamese fix, this place will do fine as long as you're not expecting truly authentic food. Total bill: $24/pp
Photo Credit: Yelp
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