T.H. Dang - Average Vietnamese

After a busy and long week of work, I found myself craving for good homey cuisine, and despite the warming weather, I gravitated back to my soul food of choice, Pho. The combination of warm soup with crisp noodles and a bevy of vegetables and meat is the perfect combination of flavours and textures that serves to re-energize and warm myself before embarking on new adventures. Thus after coming from the hospital, I had to stop at T.H. Dang's Restaurant for some Vietnamese.

T.H. Dang's rests on the busy corner of Pembina Highway and Howard Avenue. The exteriors are average with large signage that should attract attention from passers-by. I appreciated the dedicated parking lot as parking in the periphery can be difficult to find. The interiors are simply average with its combination of drab olden decor with cheap tables and rickety chairs. Finally, the one employee does an admirable job tending the restaurant, but service does suffer a bit with long wait times.

I have to continually laugh at the hybrid Vietnamese and Chinese cuisine restaurants in Winnipeg. As if the owners are not confident enough in creating their own niche, they feel the need to offer dishes from two massively divergent Asian cuisines. As with most other restaurants with this moniker, T.H. Dang's is first and foremost, a Vietnamese restaurant and features the usual pho noodle soups and vermicelli rice bowls. The addition of stir fries and hot pot dishes seem like an afterthought and tacked on to give the illusion of variety. Nevertheless, the menu does have all the usual suspects and should be able to satisfy the wishes of most diners.

I was disappointed by the broth in the Medium Rare Beef & Beef Ball Rice Noodle Soup (Pho). The broth here was devoid of the usual  depth one normally gets in pho broth but rather had an artificial sweetness that overpowered the dish and robbed it of any richness. Granted, the tender thinly sliced beef and large springy beef balls were above average, just shame about the broth.

Dang's Deluxe Vermicelli is a gargantuan boal of grilled meats (Pork, Pork Patties, Pork Hash, Shrimp, Beef) with spring rolls and a bevy of vegetables on a bed of tender rice noodles. Although I appreciated the litany of grilled meats given, each had the same flavour and texture with a hint of lemongrass and a slight bitterness from charred skin. In truth, the best part of the dish were the spring rolls with their crispy skin and moist succulent interior. The addition of the fish sauce dip adds much needed sweetness to the overall dish.

Another marker of a good Vietnamese restaurant is the crispness of their bean sprouts and accompaniments and TH Dang surpasses expectations here with fresh sprouts that added a crisp, slightly sweet crunch to each bite of pho.

Overall I found T.H. Dang's completely average. The disappointing pho broth unfortunately renders any of its noodle soups a monotonous artificial sweet flavour, a shame considering that their beef and beef balls are actually quite good. The vermicelli, while an impressively large portion, was a simple rehash of the same flavours just with different meats. If you are in the area and in need for Vietnamese, then T.H. Dang's should suffice, but there are much better in the city.