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Nghi Ngân Quán
Corner of Wright and Warren Street
Ferryden Park South Australia 5010
W not available
E not available
T 8224 6003
F not available
OPEN Monday to Friday 10.00am till 9.00pm, Saturday and Sunday 9.00am till 9.00pm
FOOD Off the main drag you would never find either Yen Linh or Nghi Ngân Quán unless you were lucky enough to have someone in the know drag you there. Both are suburban and utterly hidden. Yen Linh on the corner of Days and Regency Road is invisible behind the massive Thuan Phat supermarket and Nghi Ngân Quán in the middle of suburban Ferryden Park, the only shop in sight. At Nghi Ngân Quán a sea of glossy black heads with one orange exception, that futile attempt to turn Chinese black hair to blonde, a Sunday lunch, Nghi Ngân Quán is reassuringly packed with just four round-eye in sight. Equally Saturday lunch at Yen Linh I am the only round eye. The tradition of eating out in Asian and Chinese culture is deeply entrenched partly brought about by the lack of space and cooking facilities in many homes. Food unless you are venturing into the haute cuisine of their restaurants is fast and inexpensive, and the price pretty much dictates just how long you hang around. Both of these restaurants opening the morning, also culturally based on the sensible philosophy of breakfasting like a king, lunching like a prince and eating like a princess for the evening meal. One little tip, when eating any of these Pho style soups take care when adding fresh chilli. What might at first seem mild after steeping for the five minutes it takes for them to cool enough to eat, the chilli heat can be an altered state. Both establishments are extremely inexpensive and offer very good value for money. Phoning your order in, adding some rice as a filler and picking it up on the way home from work can mean as little as $12 per person and the food isn’t wrecked (or cold) in the time it takes to get home.
FOOD This is a big restaurant catering to the many local Vietnamese Australians who live in the area. The menu is written in both English and Vietnamese and rather longer than most restaurants in and around Hansen Road. The pho with tripe $8 for a small serve is enormous, with a decent lacing of tripe that is added to a beef based broth, so it is not as strong as some Asian and Chinese tripe dishes. They are also one of the few Adelaide restaurants to do a steamboat and of course do all the usual cold rolls with a variety of fillings. On this visit we strayed into the more Chinese items on their menu and ordered the deep–fried snapper with tamarind sauce $16 and bitter melon with egg $10. The snapper was one of the best we’ve had so far in Adelaide, crispy and crunchy, fried in clean oil it was moist fleshed and plated on a bed of lettuce and red onions rings it looked gorgeous.
The tamarind sauce was lack lustre, but the black vinegar on the table and the last of the pho chilli made a good enough sauce. We have to accept that this fish most likely would have been frozen and came without the head, considered a delicacy in most Asian and Chinese cuisines. It is possible to long for the exquisite flavours of this dish done in a fancy Chinese restaurant, where the fish would be killed seconds before it is cooked, but we are also mindful that it would probably cost four times as much. The bitter melon was disappointing mainly because it had not been quickly blanched to remove the excessive bitterness and did not come in a silken sweet sour thickened sauce threaded with egg, a memory of a dish bearing the same name and eaten in another restaurant. Well, you can’t win them all!
None of these criticisms are meant to diminish Nghi Ngân Quánwe have always been more than happy with the food we have ordered over several visits and not wanting to order bitter melon again is a small point. We have tried a steamboat, soups of all kinds cold rolls and have now added the deep–fried snapper to our list of favourites. You might also like to try the very popular avocado smoothie or the dark and dangerous looking green frothy pennywort drink.
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