Viva Vina!

Well, it was Date Night last night, and J did not dissapoint. After a quick drink at The lincoln Hotel, we headed up Lygon Street to the Vina Bar. Vina Bar is a great little Vietnamese place up near the Lygon Street Food Store. It serves cheap, and tasty food - although in my opinion, they excel at their starters more than their mains. We started with the Prawn (real, big, fresh, prawns) & Chicken Rice Paper Rolls (Goi Cuon) and the Prawn Spring Rolls (Cha Gio) which are served traditionally; with lettuce leaves, Pirella and Mint for wrapping and dipping. For Main I had a pretty forgetable Prawn & Veg stir-fry (Com Tom Rau) and J had a really lovely eggplant dish (whose name I forgot to write down). I tried to get as much of this onto my plate as I could while he wasn't looking as my meal wasn't nearly as nice.

My advice at Vina Bar is to get the Red Rice with your meal, it is just a bit nicer and a bit of a change from the usual boiled rice on offer. Vina Bar is also BYO which is a nice change for Lygon Street. We drank a bottle of 2003 Smith & Hooper's 'Wrattonbully' Cab Sav Merlot which went well with the meal, especially the eggplant.

All in all a lovely evening, which we topped off with a DVD at home - Napoleon Dynamite - recommended to us by Andy, a man with a slightly different sense of humour to my own (as I found out last night)...