This is what it takes to run a Vietnamese restaurant in Monroe: Basil &Chives owner Doquyen Huynh makes as many as five trips a week from her Renton home to Seattle’s International District for ingredients, then to Monroe to the restaurant she and her family opened in October.
It’s worth the effort, and evident from appetizer to dessert.
Basil &Chives serves what it calls Vietnamese Northwest fusion: steaks, chops and seafood familiar to most diners but made with the spices, ingredients and techniques of the Southeast Asian country.
Huynh’s brother-in-law, Minh Pham, is the executive chef. Pham attended Seattle Central Community College’s culinary program, then spent several months in Hawaii and Vietnam getting more training in Vietnamese cuisine. The traditional dishes, such as the pho noodle soup, are made by her mother.
You’ve got tough choices to make between traditional and fusion throughout a meal.
Among the appetizer choices are fresh spring rolls ($6), either traditional, mushroom herb or pineapple and chicken; smoky jalapeno wontons ($6), stuffed with three cheeses and bacon and served with a mango salsa; and coconut shrimp ($9).
During a recent dinner, my wife and I skipped the spring rolls, seeing a similar dish offered as an entree, and ordered crispy mango rice cakes ($6). If you’re picturing the rice cakes as those dry, tasteless foam disks that come in a plastic bag, don’t. These are patties of sticky rice, pan-seared to create a crisp crust and served with a sweet-and-sour mango salsa. We might have ordered this again for dessert if the choices there weren’t difficult enough.
Wanting to balance traditional and fusion for our meal, we ordered a bowl of pho noodle soup ($8, $6 at lunch), which the menu describes as a nine-spice broth simmered for eight hours and offered with either beef or chicken. It was accompanied by mung bean sprouts, basil leaves, jalapeno pepper slices and a wedge of lime. The soup’s vermicelli noodles had enough bite to them that they weren’t too soft but were easily slurped up with the delicious broth.
Other soups on the menu include wonton soup with pork and shrimp dumplings ($10, $7 lunch) and seafood soup ($12, $7 lunch) with halibut, prawns, calamari and scallops in a pork broth.
Salad choices include a spicy lemongrass salad with vermicelli, noodles and herbs with chicken or tofu ($10, $7 lunch); a Napoleon salad ($13, $11 lunch), with pan-seared chicken breast and fresh mango slices dressed in a cilantro sauce; and wild betel beef vermicelli salad ($10, $7 lunch) with slices of beef wrapped in betel leaf, grilled and served on a bed of vermicelli and long peppers.
The choices get no easier among the dinner entries with mirin-glazed short ribs ($12, $10 lunch); a rib-eye steak marinated in Basil &Chives’ long-pepper house rub ($25, $13 lunch); blue ginger halibut ($29); and kaffir lime Penn Cove mussels ($17), simmered in a creamy red curry wine sauce.
To satisfy tradition we ordered the vermicelli rice roulade ($15), which the menu describes as an “interactive dish,” allowing you to wrap your own spring rolls from a large platter of noodles, beef, pork meatballs, bean sprouts, basil and other greens and sauce. The rice wraps come to you as rigid translucent rounds that you soak in a bowl of water for a moment, then lay out on your plate to fill and wrap. Making your own spring rolls should give you an appreciation for the perfectly round rolls prepared by the kitchen staff.
For our “fusion” we shared bites of honey crisp pork chops ($15, $10 lunch), marinated in a 10-spice dry rub and served with jasmine rice and a salad of apple slices, greens and walnuts. With that many spices it’s hard to pick out the particulars, but suffice to say it tasted great.
Desserts, all house-made, include raspberry pomegranate cheesecake with a balsamic fig sauce ($6) and coconut island cream ($4), which is a Basil &Chives’ ice cream served with a nugget of fried banana hiding under the ice cream. Ice cream flavors include coconut, pandan leaf and Tahitian vanilla bean.
Lunch offers many of the same soups, salads and entrees, but also offers Vietnamese baguetti sandwiches ($6 to $9) with chicken, sauteed tofu, pork, rib-eye steak or salmon, served between two slices of French baguette and topped with spring greens, picked onion, carrots, daikon, cucumber, cilantro and basil mayonnaise (house-made). These are sandwiches packed with crunch and flavor. The sandwich comes with a choice of crisp, cooling jicama salad or a tossed green salad.
Basil &Chives offers a full bar with a selection of specialty drinks, as well as beer and wines from Washington, Oregon, California, Italy, Chile and Australia.
A selection of tea also complements the menu, including oolong, green, chrysanthemum, artichoke, jasmine, lotus and mandan milk tea.
Huynh said the family considered opening the restaurant in Kent, Bellevue and Seattle before settling on Monroe because they saw it as a way to introduce more people to their culture.
“People have really be enjoying it,” Huynh said. “Some are a little hesitant to try new things at first, but then they see it’s made with things they know.”
Consider Monroe lucky.
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