Long Provincial Vietnamese
In this solo dining adventure, Gary has one last meal in Seattle at Long Provincial Vietnamese before his flight home.
Long Provincial Vietnamese.
Between this trip and the one to the Bay Area in June, a final meal at a Vietnamese restaurant is quickly becoming the grand finale of my dining forays when I travel. For my last meal in Seattle, I had lunch at Long Provincial Vietnamese. Really, no trip to the west coast would be complete without at least one nice Asian meal since they tend to do it better out there. So even though it’d been a mere three or four hours since stuffing my face with dim sum, I found myself here.
The place setting at my table.
Getting there just as lunch service was ending – they were actually setting up the dining room for dinner service, putting tablecloths on the empty tables – I was still seated without hesitation even if it meant staying open a little longer than intended. My servers did work fast to set my table and get my order so, yeah, they still wanted to ensure I wouldn’t be there too long, not that I really blame them.
Gỏi Cuốn.
I ordered the spring roll with steamed shrimp and sliced pork to start. It’s your traditional spring roll – fresh herbs, lettuce, and rice noodles plus shrimp and pork, all wrapped up tightly. It was a fine spring roll but what they don’t mention in the list of ingredients is what I thought were dry bean curd, the kind that’s normally soaked before used as an ingredient, and, as such, gave the rolls a weird, crunchy sensation when I bit in. I wasn’t really a big fan of it. Otherwise, it’s a decent spring roll.
Phở Đặc Biệt.
I decided to go with the phở special – here, their special includes rare and cooked beef plus beef meatballs. They serve in small and large sizes. The above is small and there was a lot here so I can only imagine what the large looks like. It’s a good phở – the broth is beefy, oily, and sufficiently salty, the beef in all its incarnations were fine, and the herbage was nice. It’s just nothing special, sadly, and is equivalent to the phở I can get in New York City.
Final Thoughts
After the wonderful Vietnamese food I had while in San Francisco, I may have set myself up for failure when I walked through the doors of Long Provincial Vietnamese. The food here is fine but nowhere near excellent and if I were to visit Seattle again, I doubt I’d return. But If I lived in Seattle? Sure, I’d be back but only after I tried to find a better place first.
Long Provincial Vietnamese. 1901 2nd Avenue, Seattle, WA 98101. [Show/Hide Map]
This post was written by Gary.
