On several return visits, I sampled some of the wide variety of soups offered at Que Huong. There is nothing on a par with Que Huong in New York or San Diego, they told us. They were blown away by the quality of the food and the cheap prices. They had asked a friend in Houston to recommend a Vietnamese restaurant for them to visit. It turned out some of them were from San Diego and some were from New York. They craned their necks to check out our table, asked us what we were eating and oohed and aahed at the softshell crab and pan-fried noodles. There were six Vietnamese people at the table beside ours on that visit. I sort of liked the whole noodle-salad-and-pickled-sausage farrago, but my dining companion pronounced it 'goofy.' I think it was a wad of shrimp paste, onions and vegetables wrapped in dough, molded in a cupcake pan, deep-fried and cut in half just before being served. As weird as a fried shrimp cupcake may sound, it was actually the best thing on the plate. The pickled pork sausage reminded me of something you would find in a big bottle sitting on a bar next to the pickled eggs. Vietnamese ham turned out to be a pale, spongy meat served in thin and unappealing slices. It was a big pile of rice noodles topped with lettuce and surrounded with the other items. Our other entrée, Vietnamese ham, pickled pork sausage and fried shrimp cupcake (#097), went down in the 'what was I thinking?' category.

Who could pass on lightly fried greens and hearty pieces of beef tossed together in a spicy sauce? The tender strips of spicy beef and delicate snow pea shoots stir-fried with a little garlic on good old #063, on the other hand, were the dream topping for these noodles. It ended up looking like a plate of generic Chinese food. That sauce also contained chunks of pork, pieces of chicken, broccoli florets, carrots and shrimp. My dining companions were grossed out by the thin slices of liver and fish balls in that topping. We sampled the 'Combination Style' pan-fried noodles (#059) on another occasion. The problem is finding the right topping. When they fry up a mess of these double-wide rice noodles, the top stays loose and the bottom gets crispy and chewy. The pan-fried noodles at Que Huong (pronounced WAY HONG) are outstanding. My dining companion and I alternately wrapped the hot crunchy egg rolls and the delectable softshell crab pieces into our lettuce leaf tacos and devoured both plates.įor an entrée, we split an order of pan-fried noodles topped with spicy beef and snow pea leaves (#063). The sweet dipping sauce was lame, so I switched over to the funky fish sauce concoction that came with the Vietnamese egg rolls (#004). The next thing you know, you've got a crunchy riot going hot and cold all over your mouth. To eat it, you wrap a hot crunchy crab section in a cold lettuce leaf with some fresh herbs and cucumber, spritz it with lime juice and then dunk it in some sauce.

The tempura crab comes to the table on a pile of romaine lettuce leaves with a plate of garnishes and a sweet and hot dipping sauce on the side. The naked crab is battered and deep-fried, then cut up into sections, each of which includes some of the juicy body meat and some of the crispy legs or claws. The tempura softshell crab (#272) at Que Huong on Wilcrest is one of the wildest Vietnamese seafood dishes I've come across in years.

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