Happy belly

On our first night in Saigon, we decided to eat at Square One on the mezzanine level at Park Hyatt which, like most places we ate in on our trip, was an excellent choice for us (especially since we had to find kiddy food for the 4 hungry and tired ones). The waitress was really nice to bring the spaghetti carbonara and the margarita pizza up for the kids.

We ordered the set - which was actually a kind of degustation menu of sorts, with a mixture of both Vietnamese and Western choices all thrown together. This is what we had. Pomelo and shrimp salad (absolutely the best I ever had with freshest shrimps and the sweetest pomelo segments all thrown together with delicate herbs and aromatic roasted grated coconut), grilled shrimp paste on sugarcane (also really well done without the overly starchy bite in many others I have tried before), crackers with dip (some kind of keropok with piquant tamarind dip), grilled squid with flavoured salt (awesome and perfectly done, though the salt was the coarse kind so too much was too salty), lobster bisque (really really good bisque that was chockful of lobster, it was so rich that we couldn't finish the servings which was a real waste) and steak and fries (as good as any found in fine-dining steakhouses here. In fact, maybe ever better than some. The steak was pink and juicy on the inside and charred and perfectly salt-crusted on the outside. Even the fries were good. Our friend, Jud loved them. I especially like the 4 sauces that came in little copperpots, though they were unneccesary as the steak was simply good on its own).

And finally desserts. We had coconut custard with fresh longans in young coconuts (the coconutty taste was a little too overwhelming for me and by that time of the night I was totally stuffed. D kinda liked it, though I think it was the longans that he liked), a platter of tropical fruits (we were so taken by the effort in presentation even for cut fruits as these were placed artistically over a mould of shaved ice) and chocolate fondant with hazelnut ice-cream and a dollop of sweetened cream (amazingly, we could still eat this, considering we were so so full. The fondant [what we know here as molten chocolate cake] was very chocolatey, not very sweet and oozy in the centre; in other words: perfect. The hazelnut ice cream, which is made in house, was a perfectly accompaniment for the warm fondant. Just heavenly.

My verdict? Happy belly.