Ben's Chinese Restaurant

As an ethnic child, nothing was more time consuming than teaching your parent how to do something in a mishmash of English and their native language. For me, it was always with computers. My dad is like early fifties and never grew up with a computer, I'm pretty sure they weren't invented, readily available back then and I'm pretty sure that 1950-1970s Vietnam had bigger things to worry about back then. Like I don't know, the Vietnam war, like recovering from it or fleeing the country on boats.

 For such an intelligent man, my dad just doesn't understand or refuses to understand, how computers basically work. He has piles of meticulously written notes telling him how to turn on a computer, how to save pictures, how to copy links, how to password protect his word documents, how to submit emails and that sort of thing. He is the type of guy who types with two fingers basically.

Herpderpderp.com@yahoo

At the same time he is also a very paranoid, overly cautious and yet entirely mislead by "legit" stuff. He does things like forward chain emails about urban legends, he clicks on online ad banners, he still uses Internet Explorer, he has massive handwritten lists of all his email contacts on sheets of paper and he safely ejects USBs cause it could destroy his work. He once took me home from the library, before we had a internet ready PC, because he was trying to make an email account and he couldn't think of a user name. When I suggested he use his real name, he said the North Vietnamese government could track him down and send him to gaol.

Anyway, both him and VGirl don't have Paypal or Ebay accounts because they refuse to have them in case hackers get their accounts and steal all their money. Yet somehow internet banking is okay without virus protection software. My dad got me to buy him some stuff off Ebay and therein lies the problem.

It was a very painful twenty minute phone call where I had to explain to him how to copy and paste links from his word docx document to the main body of his email since I couldn't open the file, finding the flowers when he was referring to them by the numbers he had assigned them in the email, not understanding that Australia customs confiscates almost everything, explaining that he had to pay postage and handling on the Aussie orchids he wanted, explained I didn't have enough money in Paypal to pay for it and explaining that internet transfers weren't instantaneous.

Yep

To top it all off, I died in Don't Starve on day 82. This is a big deal.

You also never went out, cause your parents didn't trust you to order for them but you could fill out their tax returns and other important paperwork. Ben's Chinese Restaurant used to be the only place my family ever went to when we went out. It was cheap, there were huge proportions, there were menus in Vietnamese and there was karaoke as well. There would be anywhere between 10-20 of us split between two tables, adults and kids of course.

It brought back fond memories and I remembered it was good, so we decided to have dinner there one night. It wasn't as good as I remembered.

The menus were fabulous laminated folders that were slightly sticky.

Chinese banquet

Vietnamese Banquets

Chinese side

More Chinese food

Vietnamese food

Vietnamese side continued and the chef specials

Lunch special

The Vietnamese super special

More Vietnamese food, steam boat!

All the pretty lunch specials

The second page of pretty lunch specials

It was a pretty plain restaurant to be honest, we went on a weekday but it was still pretty busy. Lots of Vietnamese families and older Aussie couples eating, also lots and lots of children running around.

The tables.

We got bottles of water as soon as we sat down, most of our table was laid out already. We also got a basket of condiments including a house made tuong ot, or chilli paste and a bottle of Sriraicha.

H20?

CHILLI!

I didn't particularly want anything from the Chinese side so I went with the Vietnamese side and picked the prawn meat on sugar cane with vermicelli salad (cha tom bao mia yi bom). My mum rarely the prawn meat part because of the sheer number of prawns required to make it to her salad, possibly 90% prawns/pork mince and 10% seasonings. She also complains it takes a while to make which is odd because you just blitz it in a food processor.

Deceptive.

I adored the prawn, it was exactly how I remembered it. It was deliciously savoury, crispy edged, slightly sweet and there were huge amounts of it. I didn't like anything else. The salad was literally a mouthful of soggy carrot pickles, that were so finely shredded to be turned into mush when they pickled, dried out julienned cucumber, bean sprouts and finely shredded lettuce.

This salad was mostly vermicelli noodles to be honest, and the vermicelli noodles used were what is called banh hoi in Vietnamese, a much more delicate strand of noodle that's probably only as thick as a drawn pencil line. Its normally used for weddings and fancy things since its hard to make and topped with a green onion oil. It makes it bloody hard to eat in a salad since this one wasn't well made and it was falling apart with each mouthful.

Regular vermicelli size noodles

Super fine banh hoi type noodles
Technically both could be banh hoi, since they are parcels but the second is more skillful

This is my nuoc mam cham, fish sauce. It was perfectly seasoned, not too salty, not too sour and not too sweet.

Nuoc mam cham

I ordered a coconut juice drink. It was served warm with ice in it. Like bath water warm, all the ice melted in seconds. I wonder if they used those coconut juice packets that you can get frozen?

Not worth the money, buy yourself a packet of young coconut juice instead

My Boyfriend ordered the chicken noodle soup. Exactly as it says on the packet.

Mostly onion.

The soup was good, it had a solid flavour and would be something of the calibre that my mum would produce. My Boyfriend argues that it didn't have much flavour. Unfortunately we both agree that the rest of the soup was terrible, it was marred by the fact that the noodles were undercooked and still a touch hard, the chicken used was just steamed/boiled breast pieces and there was just huge amounts of green and white onion everywhere and not much else. And the kicker?

Ben's Chinese Restaurant:
Atmosphere: 5, your average local Asian restaurant, sticky menus, lots of rowdy Asian kids and none of the waiters speak much English
Service: 5, average. Got our food. We left our umbrella behind and they ignored my Boyfriend for ten minutes, so he just went back inside and picked it off the floor, he had to ask another customer to move to get to it.
Food: 4, pretty bleh all around, thank god its so cheap otherwise I'd be more upset about the whole thing