Next to the infamous and popular Balcony, Helene’s Place serves both lunch and dinner but you would never notice this place when the boys are around. They claim to specialize in Southern Vietnamese food but the reality is a long way short of authentic. The best thing that can be said about the weird 80s lights, peeling pink walls, tired menu and plastic plates is it does at least help lower expectations. The first disappointment is the fried spring roll. It should be filled with bean sprouts, spring onions, mushrooms, pork and rice vermicelli but all you find under the rice paper are some soggy noodles. And why do so many Vietnamese restaurants in town insist on serving their spring rolls with sweet and sour chili sauce? How about a nice (and authentic) fish sauce? The special stuffed pancake, like the spring rolls and other fried dishes we’ve tried, gives the impression that the price of cooking oil recently dropped dramatically. Another failure is the beef fondue in sour soup. Instead of thin layers of beef to dip into an aromatic soup flavored with vinegar, coconut and ginger, you get thick beef and an insipid broth cooked on a dangerous-looking gas stove. And don’t even ask for the normal side dishes like green banana and star fruit. The pork sausage is so rubbery it squeaks and the steamed rice cake with shredded pork is more dessert than main course. To be fair, other dishes aren’t as bad. The barbecued chicken with glutinous rice and shrimp on sugar cane are pleasant, but nothing you would bother telling your Vietnamese friends about. We kind of hoped that the beef noodle soup (pho) would make up for the rest but it turns out plain wrong: from the five-spice smell of the soup to the tasteless thick beef and the fresh-from-plastic bag noodles (and they’re the wrong type). To top things off, service (while perfectly polite), is clearly meant for office workers who have a lot of lunchtime to kill. So if you’re impatient and have ever eaten real Vietnamese food, then this is not the place for you. Corkage B100.
