Vegetarian restaurants can often be a cause of culinary division between friends. Personally, whilst I enjoy a healthy dose of vegetables, I don’t often crave a fully vegetarian meal. However, after an unhealthy dose of meats and seafood over the Christmas and New Year period, I found myself dragging myself and my dining companion to Simple Asian in Canley Heights, a relatively new vegetarian offering that was rumoured to be good.
We went at about 2PM, what I would consider safely past the lunch rush, yet it was ridiculously busy. Simple Asian have a fairly expansive menu from spring rolls to Vietnamese pancake (banh xeo) to noodle soups to dishes you can eat with rice. I wanted to really test out how good the vegetables would be as a substitute to a truly meaty Vietnamese dish so opted for the ‘bun mam’. What is bun mam? Well, it is a noodle soup with rice vermicelli (bun) in a broth flavoured with mam (which is fermented fish) so there is a distinctively strong (but delicious) smell. It typically also has pork, seafood (squid, prawns), and eggplant into which you also put fresh herbs. Hard to imagine the broth done vegetarian! Yet, Simple Asian do an outstanding job. The broth is strong on lemongrass and chilli without being too spicy and there is a huge amount of eggplant, mushrooms and ‘fake meat’ made from soy protein with some of the pieces looking and tasting like fish and others like pork belly.
The only downside to Simple Asian is that the kitchen is relatively new, so they moved a little too slowly for my liking (it took almost an hour for our 2 dishes to be served).
Details: Simple Asian Vegetarian Cuisine, 252 Canley Vale Rd, Canley Heights NSW 2166
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