Red Lantern...

[khiemtran]

It's Thursday night and we're a long way from home. In Surry Hills, in fact, for a rare mid-week adventure. We have a booking, you see, at Red Lantern.



Red Lantern is a quite famous Sydney restaurant that's known for its modern Vietnamese cuisine and its equally famous owners, including Luke Nguyen (celebrity chef and now tv presenter),his sister Pauline (author of Secrets of the Red Lantern) and Mark Jensen (Pauline's partner and a celebrity chef and author in his own right).

To get a Saturday night, you apparently have to wait up to two months. If you want a table of more than six, you need a $300 deposit. We had a party of four so we didn't need a deposit and we chose a Thursday night, so we only had to book two weeks ahead. Even then, we had the table only until 9pm, when the second sitting started.



As recommended to us by some workmates, we choose the tasting menu which included nine dishes with an optional dessert platter afterwards. Here are some of the starters. The salt and pepper squid was outstanding.



And now the mains... Braised pork shoulder - wonderfully soft and cooked with shrimp paste, lemongrass and coconut milk.



Char grilled mackerel with "Aunty 9"'s dressing...



Bò lúc lắc (wok fried beef)...



Water spinach, wok-fried with a rich, deep smoky taste....



An "Asian mushroom" salad with fried tofu skins...



We actually got two extra dishes because HL doesn't eat beef - which was very nice of them. So the nine course tasting menu turned out to be an eleven course one. Were we still going to try for dessert?



Of course we were!



All up... wow! That was a great night out. And we even got to linger a few minutes past nine o'clock because they had a cancellation for the next sitting. Of course, it was a long drive to get home again and HL and I (and Liem when we picked him up from our friends' place) were all exhausted by the time we got back.

Comments

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

That looks like a truly scrumptious culinary experience. :D

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

It was! It's not often we get to go out past our bedtime (especially midweek) so it was a rare treat. And it was nice to get a bit of adult conversion too...

[aliettedb.livejournal.com]

*drools* I love salt and pepper squid.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

It was amazingly light and soft. Tôi dặc biệt thích bò lúc lắc.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Beautifully photographed!

My mouth's watering--and I just ate!

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Thanks! The presentation and service were excellent (as you'd expect for a restaurant that's so hard to get into). The restaurant was also in a converted terrace house so it was very narrow as well, coincidentally almost exactly the same width as every house and shop front in Vietnam.