The Lunch Lady: Vietnamese street food in Vancouver

The Lunch Lady is a Vietnamese restaurant located in Vancouver. With origins since 1995, the original “lunch lady” Mrs. Nguyen Thi Thanh, has served different Vietnamese street food to Saigon locals and travelers.

This review is based on a takeout experience.

Food

Unfortunately, there was something wrong with our order and they missed the beef carpaccio we ordered and gave us an extra fried rice instead.

Their in-dining menu offers more varieties than their takeout menu and it is also cheaper.

Crispy spring rolls ($10)

We choose the pork spring rolls, but you can opt for a vegetarian version.

The spring rolls tasted fine but nothing I haven’t tasted before. I usually prefer Vietnamese spring rolls to be fried in the rice paper. For the price, it is expensive.

Crispy Chili Salted Prawns ($18)

This appetizer has fried black tiger prawns, floating crispy shells and a fish sauce vinaigrette. The menu says it comes in 6 pieces but it will look like more than 6 pieces because some of them are just the shells of the prawns (no actual prawn meat).

Regardless, this is a really taste appetizer and it’s fried very well. Even the empty shells taste quite good and you can eat the entire thing even though it’s a shell.

Stir fried noodle with beef ($18)

This main has stir fried instant noodles, sliced beef, gai lan and crackling pork. Everything tastes quite good but I am not the biggest fan of them using instant noodles for the noodle base. It makes me question the $18 price tag.

Garlic fried noodles ($18)

The garlic noodles was one of the items I wanted to try out the most. They use egg noodles sautéed in garlic xo butter, topped with aged parmigiano reggiano. The garlic noodles were yummy and flavourful, but I can’t help but feel it’s missing a component because it doesn’t come with anything else. If they provide some sort of protein or vegetable with it, this dish would be more worth it.

House special fried rice ($18)

So we receive 2 orders of this fried rice, which has house-cured pork belly, prawns, egg, lap cheong sausage and crispy rice. I wouldn’t say the rice is very crispy, but it is a nice fried rice that smells very good.

Aside from that, we had one friend who found it to be too salty after awhile, but I found the fried rice to be fine.

Beef noodle soup ($16)

I didn’t include the broth in this picture because we were re-heating it on the stove. This is a pretty standard pho with beef brisket, rare beef, rice noodles and 24 hour beef broth.

Again, nothing extraordinary in my opinion but it is a decent bowl of beef noodle soup.

Final thoughts

Overall, I wouldn’t say I am severely impressed by the Lunch Lady. Aside from the prawns, I did not feel like the other dishes were worth $16-18. Everything tasted good, but I felt as if everything was overhyped and overpriced.

One positive note is that this is a different Vietnamese restaurant in the sense that they offer unique street food dishes. You can find a beef pho in practically any Vietnamese restaurant, but I have yet to find places that offer their other dishes.

Sincerely, Loewe