5 Photos

by Stephanie Sherrill
on Monday, March 02, 2009 12:00 AM

Vietnamese is one of the latest cuisine trends to hit Shanghai with several restaurants opening over the past six months. While many of these have been on the high-end of the dining spectrum, Phoking hopes to make its mark with traditional, everyday food. While high-end dining is nice, they believe that the authentic Vietnamese experience is best in the inexpensive dishes with big, bold flavor, and that once Shanghai experiences their food, we will fall in love with Vietnamese food as they have. Judging by the buzz in this fairly new restaurant it seems that many people already have.
Our meal began with a traditional fried Egg Rolls (15RMB) which had big, bold flavor. To balance out the fried dish, we also ordered Spring Rolls (13RMB) made with healthy fresh vegetables, herbs and plump shrimp rolled up together in rice paper. It is accompanied by a sweet and tangy peanut sauce.
Phoking's Pho Combo, that most common of every-day Vietnamese dishes, is huge-portioned with tender meat, noodles, herbs and great flavored broth (31RMB). For a more authentic taste we added the basil and mint to our big bowls resulting in a truly flavorful dish.

We ended the meal with an Iced Coffee (19RMB) and dessert. The coffee was rich and served with sweet condensed milk. For dessert we settled on the Mango and Pomelo Sago (22RMB) which was easily shared between two. This refreshing dessert soup contained numerous sweet mango pieces swimming in a cool tangy soup.
If not in the mood for pho, Phoking's menu also contains all the traditional favorite foods such as vermicelli dishes, curries, shrimp with tamrind sauce, papaya salad and a great pork chop dish.

The Bottom Line: Phoking features flavorful, fresh every-day Vietnamese food at every-day prices.