Fine Dining: Return to Nguyen's

My boyfriend is 6'4". When we go out to eat, the meal usually ends with me sitting with boxed leftovers while he's still going. If we go to some sort of buffet, I'm usually halfway through a dessert plate I piled with too much food because I never learn and he's still going on plate #4.

Except at Nguyen's Friday night, we were both down maybe a few bites into the main course. The soup, salad, and sushi did both of us in.

We stopped by my parents' house with three boxes of leftovers--we couldn't even finish said sushi--where my brother said we were just in time for dinner. I told him we just ate and said, "Guess where? Where's the only place around here where you can come home with three boxes of leftovers?" My mom responded immediately with, "Nguyen's."

My mom suggests getting the lunch portions--they're cheaper and smaller.

The last time I ate Nguyen's, I had takeout. Dining in was a nice experience. It's one of the nicest places in the county, and it was nice and quiet until later in the evening.

The food is also more impressive dining in. Everything is presented beautifully, for one, and you get some little bonuses like little tofu chunks in peanut sauce with the salad (if you order a vegetarian meal). This time, I actually did branch out and tried the vermicelli salad delight (boyfriend got the pad thai with steak and shrimp). I hate the bean sprouts and the rice noodles definitely need the plum sauce they give you to help them out. Fortunately, it's really good. Unfortunately, they don't give you enough, but that could be because I'm one of those people that smothers all my food in condiments. I douse my salads in dressing. I smother my fries and veggie burgers in ketchup. I'm not one for subtlety.

My boyfriend, who has some minor complaint about every single place we have ever eaten with few exceptions, didn't complain.

I'm still obsessed with the cucumber rolls. They were a little chewy this time, but I still had to instruct my boyfriend to take them away and keep them at the far corner of the table. The same goes for the miso soup. In fact, my original plan was to order a few cucumber rolls and miso soup alone, and then I saw the dinner menu and once again made the mistake of ordering more than I could eat.

Everything can be summed up by the following tale: the next day and night, I was still munching on the cucumber rolls. My boyfriend walked into my kitchen and said, "Hey, can I have a piece of your cucumber roll?" I had already eaten the whole thing.