We’ve been meaning to go to Jacob’s Vietnamese place in Ashfield for quite a few months now, but have failed each time due to their odd opening hours. Though they open 7 days a week, they both open a bit late for breakfast, and close a bit too early for dinner. It’s a good thing that when they do open in the morning, however, they offer a full on all-day Vietnamese menu.
We had the phở đặc biệt (the special beef rice noodle soup) for $19, which is quite a reasonable price for the size of the meal. There was a good helping of rare beef, tendon, beef balls, and tripe. The tripe and tendon in particular being not something that you see in a lot of pho restaurants these days – including sadly Pho Vien down the road.
The taste of the pho was quite good. It had quite a traditional and flavourful broth, and came with a lot of green onion as well as a very healthy portion of bean sprouts, which I love. Unfortunately I did find I did find (and my partner found this too) a bit of an unusual and unpleasant taste with the tendon. Even though I normally love tendon, and the texture of the tendon was perfect, the flavour of it was kind of weird. I don’t know why this has happened, if it’s a one-off thing or if it’s a recurrent thing to do with where they sourced it from. But I really didn’t love it.
The other thing that we had on our first visit was the cơm tấm đặc biệt,($19), the broken rice deluxe with the grilled pork chop, shredded pork skin, steamed pork cake and fried egg. This is really a dish that was more than the sum of its parts, many of which were fine in insolation but great in combination.
For starters, we did not love the pork skin, even though I’m sure it was perfectly adequate according to the standards by which pork skin prepared in this manner are usually judged. The egg was fried and fully cooked which is I guess fine, and perhaps it’s only our westernized taste buds that prefer a partially cooked egg. The pork loaf and the pork chop were delicious, with no negative points to say about them, and of course the fish sauce really helped to bring everything together, moisten the rice and make it all great.
First visit thoughts – Overall, the meal was only $38, and really got two adults very full at 10am in the morning, and for the rest of the day. I had wanted to get some more stuff, and was luckily talked out of it, so we ended up actually going again a few weeks later (prior to this review being published).
On our second visit we started off with some chicken wings ($15), which were quite unexciting, flavoured essentially with salt and not much else, lacking completely in complex spices and flavours apart from the side of dipping sauce and pickled vegetables. It didn’t feel like a restaurant dish, and I didn’t feel like they were any better than what I could do with my air fryer at home.
The bun bo hue ($19) was contrastingly pretty good – a large bowl, with a huge quantity of different meats inside and a nice tangy-spicy taste. It wasn’t the best I’ve had in Sydney, but definitely one of the better in recent times, and probably better than Pho Vien’s down the street.
This beef brisket with bread roll ($19?) was really thick and rich, probably too rich for me to eat having already had my half of the BBH. Neither of us were able to finish it, and we had to take it home, where it was diluted by takeaway frozen broth from Pho Vien and subsequently consumed. That said, the bread was very nice and does mean that their banh mi has potential to be quite good as well. An adventure for next time.
ADVENTURE, NEXT TIME
I returned by myself for some banh mi, thinking that I would get two and eat half of each.
The crispy skin pork roll ($10) was pretty good. I enjoyed the crispy crackling pork, and the flavour of the roll overall, though felt that it was overall a bit light in terms of filling quantity, particularly that of the meat. Something that I did enjoy was that the bread went briefly into a toaster oven before serving, making it nice and warm and crispy.
The feeling of lightness was particularly amplified when it came to the cold cut pork roll ($7), which was so minimal and unsubstantial that there’s no way I could recommend it given the other local options available.
Jacob’s Vietnamese Place
27 Hercules St, Ashfield NSW 2131
