ANAN Saigon Streetfood — Restaurant in Utrecht

Uncomfortable chairs, dull taste. Shorthand advice: if the place is crowded, walk away. Especially if there is a vacancy sign for waitresses.

I sat outside, the lack comfort is the only resemblance of Saigon. Tiny, hard plastic stools, wobbly small tables. I waited 12 minutes before the waiter came to ask if I had any intention. Then the story decelerated even further. The dip sauce arrives at 17minutes, the lime juice arrives at 22minutes. At 40 minutes I stand up, cause my sciatic nerve is dying on that hard surface and I can't feel my feet. The waiter comes by, and asks if indeed I haven't received food yet. He disappears to ask the kitchen what is going on. He comes back shortly: the food is coming "in a bit" (??). I keep walking around my table, the only reason I haven't left yet is that I'm really hungry. At around 50 minutes the people who came after me are paying and leaving. A new waitress arrives with my food, roasted duck to be rolled in rice paper, except she brought no rice paper. Another 3 minutes waiting for her to bring four sheets of rice paper allowed my roasted duck to reach 20 degrees celsius. I rolled the content on the plate in the intended 4 rolls, ate it, paid, and left.

The place runs the typical Dutch restaurant business drill: short on personnel, with maximal number of tables, no anticipation and solution for the inevitably high chance of human errors. Oh yeah, and rudimentary flavoring. The real Saigon streetfood would be a lot less variety on the menu, but getting your choice within 10 minutes. And of course with unforgettable taste.

The taste was dull, with sad variety of tasteless vegetables, the lime juice resembled the metallic taste of some concentrated lemon additive. The cold duck meat was worthless.The four sheets of rice paper leaves you with no choice how you roll the content.

None of the waiters said anything like: sorry that it took so long. So obviously it's their usual way...

The atmosphere and service was really nice. The food was served quickly but sadly its quality was disappointing. We ordered phở, bánh canh, mỳ hoành thánh and gỏi cuốn bò, but none of them actually tasted like the Vietnamese food that we ate in Vietnam (by the way, I'm Vietnamese and have been living in Vietnam for 18 years - so I know how authentic Viet food tastes like). The gỏi cuốn bò was actually the best dish, but it was quite strange since we don't normally eat gỏi cuốn bò (beef) in Vietnam but we have gỏi cuốn heo (pork) instead. Mỳ hoành thánh and bánh canh are two completely different and unrelated dishes, but somehow their soup base tasted the same! (also, the soup tasted like vegetarian soup - so at first we thought they served us the wrong dish). At first we were glad since Ăn Ăn was one of the restaurants that open during lunchtime on Sunday, however we were soon disappointed by the food as it tasted nothing like Vietnamese food. I really do hope the restaurant put in the effort to improve their food, otherwise foreigners are going to have a wrong impression of how signature Viet dishes...

We came here (without reservation) based on a friend's recommendation. Although we got a table without reservation (which I think you should have if you want to eat here), we did not get any menu to look at for about 15 minutes. After we got the menu, it turned into a waiting game, we had to wait for 45 minutes to get our orders taken. As we were ready to go and just paid for the drinks that we had, the waitress finally came and asked whether we've had our orders taken. Once we ordered, the food came within 10 minutes, and they were quite tasty. We had a smaller dish and two bigger dishes to share. We had another waiting game to pay the bill. Overall, the experience was dragged down by the service.

Upside: Very vegetarian and vegan friendly, quick food (once you get to order) Downside: Very slow service and noone seems to be paying attention to the customers except for running around in the restaurant. Would I go again? Maybe when I've reserved a table and the place...