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3143 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, Va.
(703) 276-0935
Hours of Operation and Prices
Lunch: Daily 11-2:30
Dinner: Sun-Th 2:30-9:30, F-Sat 2:30-10:30
Lunch Entrees: Sun-Th $4.25-$5, Sat-Sun $7.50-$9
Dinner Entrees: $7.50-$9
Other Information
• MasterCard, Visa
• Reservations accepted for 8 or more
• Dress: casual
• Free parking
• Nearest Metro: Clarendon
• Handicapped accessible
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All of the Vietnamese restaurants in Arlington's Little Saigon serve the standard dishes: cha gio, summer rolls, pho, grilled pork, lemon grass chicken and more. Thus, clearly the survivors are good enough to meet the competition. So how to choose? It depends on what you want to eat.
Cafe Dalat is one of the smaller restaurants, with a menu that is not as extensive as Queen Bee's down the street. Given the unadorned look of the place, you can guess that the prices are low. Most of the dishes are grilled, and that's what draws me back to Cafe Dalat: simple, lightly seasoned grilled meat or seafood. The sweet-soy marinated pork is crunchy, chewy and flavorful. Even better is the skewered seafood. The menu doesn't quite explain the dish, but it's a kind of mixed-seafood mousse, formed into small balls and threaded on skewers with squares of onion and green pepper. Unlike most ground-seafood dishes, this one tastes fresh and clearly of shellfish. It's light and airy, faintly caramelized, and is meant to be wrapped with cilantro, shredded vegetables and white rice noodles in leaves of lettuce, then dipped in a golden, fruity peanut sauce. A beer and a platter of Vietnamese skewered seafood, pork, beef or chicken - that's heavy competition for American fast food.
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
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