When Viet Nom opened at Cyber Hub, Gurgaon, last year, I had ecstatically welcomed it as a restaurant that let its food do the talking. It had ventured into a territory—Vietnamese cuisine—no one had gone into before and its owners, Manish Sharma and Sahil Sambhi of Molecule fame, together with their food consultant, Rupali Dean, spared no expense or effort to understand its finer points.
Vietnamese cuisine, beyond the pho (noodle soup) and bahn mi (submarine sandwich made with baguette bread), is nuanced— one moment a rice paper roll may taste bland, despite the invigorating flavours of fresh vegetables, but at the next, upon the addition of a gentle dip, it can taste quite friendly to a masala-craving palate. There’s also a depth to the cuisine because of the array of multicultural influences, notably French, Chinese and Indian. It is an adventurous proposition to pioneer a cuisine that is not in-your-face spicy, as in the case of other South-East Asian offerings popular in Delhi-NCR, or more famously in the case of Punjabi Chinese. But the Viet Nom trio have held on to their faith in the food they serve.
So, you may need the sweet and sour dipping sauce to come to your rescue one more time when you dig the light and crunchy salmon and avocado summer rolls. The pan-seared, satay-flavoured Chicken Golden Bao, on the other hand, bursts with textures and flavours; so does the Crispy Tofu tossed in chilli hoisin sauce with chillies, or the grilled shrimp mousse served on sugarcane skewers.
Carrying the diversity bit a little further, we have the Viet Nom pizzas on rice crackers topped up with egg and the main ingredient (pork chorizo or chicken) and the famous La Lot, tenderloin or chicken wrapped in betel leaves and served with peanut sauce. For mains, I have three favourites: Crunchy seasonal vegetables in mango gravy; the unputdownable mango fish, and stir-fried prawns in chilli tamarind curry. Each one of these dishes brings with it a unique mélange of textures and flavours, which means there’s no room for predictability in Viet Nom. And it has in fact come up a notch or two after reopening.