Review: Lunch Lady

Lunch Lady is an elevated Vietnamese restaurant in Vancouver

I finally made it to Lunch Lady, a Vietnamese restaurant on Commercial Drive that opened during the Covid-19 pandemic. The inspiration behind the restaurant is Nguyen Thi Thanh, who has a soup noodle stall in Ho Chin Minh City. 

The late celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain visited her during an episode of No Reservations and nicknamed her the "lunch lady". Her stall specialises in various soup bases for her rice noodles. 

A few years ago second-generation Vietnamese-Canadian Michael Tran visited Nguyen's stall and tried to persuade her to open a restaurant in Vancouver. She didn't take him seriously, until he got his mother, restaurateur Victoria Tran to speak to Nguyen on the phone and won her over.

Nguyen was named "Lunch Lady" by Bourdain

Nguyen was unable to come for the official opening of Lunch Lady, but finally made it last year -- twice. The second time was when Lunch Lady was awarded the Bib Gourmand by the Michelin Guide for Vancouver.

My friend and I went for lunch today and first of all parking is difficult to come by in the neighbourhood, but we eventually found a spot by the nearby Grandview Park. Then we were surprised to find there was a waitlist at the restaurant when there was no physical queue. There were also a lot of empty tables which made us wonder what was going on.

The host asked if we minded sitting by the bar and we agreed in order to avoid waiting 20-25 minutes for a table. With two people, sitting at the bar is fine, and the solo diner sitting next to me left soon after.

There's a lunch set for C$30 per person, which includes the crispy prawn fritter, two daily soup specials, and two non-alcoholic drinks which is a decent deal.

How do you eat these prawn fritters elegantly?

We had expected the prawn fritters would be like Thai prawn cakes but we were completely wrong -- they were like giant crackers with two plump prawns on them and deep-fried. We were told to wrap them in lettuce with mint and basil and dip them in fish sauce.

It was quite awkward eating these fritters, as we were given massive, thick lettuce leaves to wrap this rectangular cracker. 

For our soup special for Friday it was bun bo hue, thinly sliced beef, pork hock, Vietnamese ham, blood pudding, and thick vermicelli noodles in a spicy lemongrass pork broth.

It's a sizeable portion and came steaming hot. We were also given lots of condiments -- the usual bean sprouts, generous bunch of sliced jalapenos, two lime wedges, and two small stainless steel cups of chilli sauce and smeared on the edge was fermented shrimp paste.

The noodle bowl's mixed bag of ingredients were good on the whole, the beef was not fatty at all, there was a slice of fish cake and a meat ball. The blood pudding was nice to have, but the texture wasn't smooth like Chinese ones, though the colour was a hue of deep maroon. 

Large bowl of beef, pork and blood pudding

The soup base was already a bit on the spicy side for me, overpowering the lemongrass flavour; I washed down the noodles with a glass of calamansi soda, but I quite enjoyed eating this noodle soup and couldn't stop eating it even though it was a large portion.

We were so full we couldn't even consider dessert after, which is too bad since it's a trek for us to get to the restaurant.

Nevertheless, it really is a good lunch spot... and now I wonder how dinner would be...

As we were leaving just before 3pm the restaurant was still busy, proving that Lunch Lady is no fad.

Lunch Lady

1046 Commercial Drive

Vancouver, BC

604 559 5938