460. Dan Lee At Eat Vietnam.

 

  Dan Lee was the winner of the BBC’s Masterchef The Professionals competition programme in 2021. Subsequently he has been working at the Digbeth Dining Club and the Hockley Social Club where he has recently ended a long term residency. He has also worked at a number of pop up collaborations at various restaurants, most recently, I think, with Kray Tredwell at the latter’s 670 Grams. I had not thus far managed to be free on any of the evenings for which these collaborations were advertised and Hockley Social Club is just too much of a pain to get to from where I live in the evening. Hence I had not yet had the opportunity to experience Dan Lee’s food though I did once sit two tables away from him at a Kray Tredwell/Le Petit Bois collaboration in Moseley one evening (Blog 295) where he, like myself, were enjoying what was being served from the kitchens there. 

Dan Lee at Le Petit Bois, January 2023.

  Recently, however, it seemed at last that my long wait to eat his food was to end when a Sunday lunch collaboration with Eat Vietnam in Stirchley was announced and I hurried to make a reservation. I was irritated to find that it was impossible to make a reservation for a single diner but I made a reservation for two and a good friend was happy to join me to see what Lee had on offer. It was also an opportunity to revisit Ming Nham’s Eat Vietnam (Blog 270) as more time had elapsed since I had last eaten there than I had intended.

Dan Lee, Masterchef winner in 2021.

  Lee’s website notes that he trained at University College, Birmingham and he has also gained culinary experience working in his aunt’s takeaway shop. He travelled to various parts of Asia as well as Greece, France and New Zealand and this coupled with his English, Irish and Cantonese heritage enabled him, he felt, to develop his own multicultural fusion cuisine which led to him winning Masterchef and now forms the basis of the dishes he serves.

  The frontage of Eat Vietnam remains odd and still bears the name of Munchies, the greasy spoon café which had been located the as well as the large red and yellow poster with the sphinx-like inscription, “FISH SAUCE IS NOT FOR EVERYONE”, neither of which is helpful with locating the restaurant if one is a stranger to the area. But inside it was warm on a chilly, miserable damp day and the welcome was even warmer from a front of house staff member who had previously worked at The Wilderness. I spotted Ming Nham beavering away in the kitchen and then Dan Lee at the pass, the restaurant was filling up rapidly and the steam was rising in the kitchen. It was really quite thrilling though a tasty Saigon Gimlet proved to be a pleasingly soothing libation to counter the increasingly building anticipation of it all.

  This was to be a six course menu - a Sunday ‘Family Feast’, though this was more service à la Française than service à la Russe. The opening act of three dishes was served as one, then the two mains with accompanying plates together and finally the dessert. It was to be hearty, beautifully cooked and delicious. But I run ahead of myself.

  First came a platter of lettuce cups with pork ends, a completely delicious sandwich with lettuce substituting for bread, with brilliantly cooked pieces of pork belly, admirably crispy and tasty, possibly the most successfully cooked example of that meat I can recall being served to me, wrapped in a lettuce leaf (surely, the only useful thing you can do with a lettuce leaf apart from shredding it to use as part of a base of prawn cocktail or just feeding it to the pet rabbit), magnificent crispy butterflied prawns - such stuff as dreams are made on - and a scintillating papaya and pomelo salad. Who could ask for anything more? Well there was more to come, and no-one was sad about that.

  

  The highlight must have been the supremely perfectly cooked whole battered sea bass served with a delightful sweet and sour sauce. The fish was lovely - its beautiful white flesh exhilaratingly moist and tasty - and with it came individual dishes of plump, unctious slow cooked short rib, enhanced with fish sauce, caramel and coconut water with a perfectly cooked quail’s egg alongside it. In addition to these gems were dishes of lap cheong fried rice (with its tasty slivers of pork sausage) and a tofu skin salad which for the first time in my life, made me feel there there might be some use for tofu after all.

  These had been generously portioned dishes but there was still good reason to make room in my abdomen for the intriguingly flavoured dessert of mango and pandan cheesecake. The cheesecake was very well made - nice and smooth and just on the right side of the borderline of sweetness with, er, non-sweetness (I wouldn’t say savoury). The smallest flies in the ointment were the tiny cubes of unripe mango garnishing the cheesecake - they were flavourless and while their extreme firmness may have given a degree of texture to the dishes, it was not a particularly nice one. How I should have liked a real full-bodied hit of sweet, soft mango to seal the deal. Still, this was a small fly in the ointment and in the great, grand sweep of a very fine south east-style meal, it mattered but little.

  This had been a memorable meal with some very fine dishes - rustic but triumphant. The combination of Dan Lee and Ming Namh would appear to be a culinary marriage made in heaven.

Rating:- 🌞

9 February 2025.