Vinh Hoa

On Sundays we often go out to eat with Kimmy's family, usually Vietnamese food. This past Sunday, we went to a place that we've been a couple times: Vinh Hoa, a Vietnamese/Chinese seafood place down off of Bellaire. As you walk in, there are huge tanks where they keep a lot of the seafood that they cook: Tilapia, other fish, abalone, crabs, and even geoduck (which we've seen and were fascinated by on the show Dirty Jobs before). This time, Kimmy's dad asked the waitress for her recommendations, and we got a few dishes and ate family style - standard at this place. We got:
- Soup Mang Cua (Crab and Fish Soup) - usually pretty good, I think I like the one with asparagus in it a little more.
- Rau Muong - vegetable, like spinach with a think stem, cooked with garlic
- Clams in a brown spicy (w/ jalapeno) sauce
- Tofu in a similar brown sauce
- Steamed Chicken with a ginger garlic sauce - I really liked the sauce, but I'm not sure if anyone else ate the chicken with the sauce.
- Giant Freakin' King Crab - had some good garlic flavor to it, nice and moist - served on a giant bed of seafood rice.

And 4 of us (me, Kimmy, Kimmy's dad and sister) ate all of that with rice, and didn't have much left.

Very nice meal, and fun experience checking out the fish and shellfish in the tanks on the way in and out. The waitress recommended the geoduck to us, and I would have been all for it, but Kimmy and her sister decided against it. I should mention that the best thing we've ever had there were their razor clams, which are very interesting: long, skinny, meaty clam in a sauce similar to the one on the clams we had this time.